EMI Says Online File Storage Is Illegal

WiglyWorm writes "MP3tunes CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicize EMI's ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service."

Comments

Unfortunately

[ricebowl]

EMI believes that consumers aren't allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service.

Sadly, in some markets, he's probably correct. I can't speak for America, though I'd assume the Fair Use doctrine would apply, but in the UK I'm fairly certain that it's still, albeit perhaps only technically, illegal (sorry, I couldn't find a more authoritative source) to copy CDs for any purpose, whether for transfer to an iPod for practical purposes or simply as an archival backup.

I'd hazard a guess, insofar as I'd want to try and infer reason in the minds of music executives, that online storage is probably perceived as being equal to distribution via p2p. I hope that, some day, a music company might at least try to employ someone familiar with IT. Presumably it'd save them a little time and money.

Re:Unfortunately

[Ed Avis]

IMHO this makes a lot of sense. You can do whatever the hell you want with the CD you purchased - the only thing you cannot do is make a copy of it, with limited exceptions for fair dealing. That's traditionally how copyright law worked and it's how it still applies to books. It just needs to be explicit that the temporary copy made in the memory of the CD player or the computer to play the music does not infringe copyright.

Of course, the publishers want to have it both ways - at some times to insist on a strict interpretation of traditional copyright, and at others to insist that what you bought is a 'licence' rather than a CD or computer program, and they can restrict you even further than copyright allows.

Re:Unfortunately

[Kjella]

I'd hazard a guess, insofar as I'd want to try and infer reason in the minds of music executives, that online storage is probably perceived as being equal to distribution via p2p Ah, but there's a vital difference because with P2P you transfer the copy to a different legal entity. If I rent a bank deposit box, the bank may be handling the copy but it remains my copy. Is MP3tunes allowed to offer a "mp3 vault" for my music? Apart from being a much more specialized service, it is any different than any other online backup solution? I haven't bothered to read the specifics but I hardly think it'll be the same case as P2P.

Re:Unfortunately

[will_die]

There is no fair use about this.
EMI is saying when you upload a file to an on-line site you are lossing posestion of the file and it is entering the possestion of the site you uploaded the file too. It the uploader is still claiming rights to the file then a copy was made. Making an additional copy of the music is a right that only EMI can give. Never mind that all the music upload was not from EMI.
mp3tunes case was that they were not sharing the files, only available to the uploader, and they did nothing with the files except provide backup protection and allow the uploader purchaser access to them.
The lower court has already decided on this in favor of mp3tunes. This was back in March, the item released today was more in the area of a press release.

Then as you say this will boil down to laws not keeping up with the way technology is going. Chances are in most states in the US and most other countries EMI is probably right in the law.

Re:Unfortunately

[electrictroy]

>>>"the publishers want to have it both ways - at some times to insist on a strict interpretation of traditional copyright, and at others to insist that what you bought is a 'licence' rather than a CD or computer program, and they can restrict you even further than copyright allows."

I've found that assassination is an effective way to deal with dictators... including CEOs. The record execs have not reached that stage where they deserve to die, but if they continue "eating out" the substance of our citizens, harassing them with stupid court cases, then they will have crossed the line.

"From time to time, the blood of patriots and tyrants must be spilt to water the Tree of Liberty." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democratic Party, 3rd President of the United States

Rippling Ramifications

[frkbros44]

I submit that the most siginficant aspect of this story is that it demonstrates now the artificial market interference of the "anti-piracy" enforcers is already being used to arbitrarily restrict user freedoms in areas that are only incidentally related to the purpose of copyrights.

This kind of rippling ramification will become ever more common as the legacy duplication and distribution industries get ever more desperate in protecting their obsolote business model from technological progress.

Um, inflammatory title anyone?

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

I can't find anything in the woefully short article or the summary that supports the claim of the title.

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know. But there is one, inescapable truth - Internet piracy is mostly to blame. The statistics speak for themselves - one in three discs world wide is a pirate. Yes, but still, that is just statistics. Would that 1/3 be bought if there was no piracy. Suppose hypothetically that I have $50 to spend on CDs per month, and that now in the internet age I also download $25 worth of music in addition to spending $50 on CDs. In that case nothing is lost.

If piracy is bad for music, it's probably only bad for top-40 artists. For the rest of the musicians it is exposure that helps them escaping from the obscurity that big media gives them by not broadcasting their material. Fortunately, sites like cdbaby.com allow us to preview excellent non-top-40 records, and to get them for excellent prices. Additionally, they give a large share (IIRC 90%) to the artists. So, I prefer buying there than records that went through the whole chain, and give only little back to the artist.

Additionally, it is probably iTunes at al that are killing your business. I can feel your pain, but digitally, it's much easier to browse and "preview" CDs. They are usually cheaper, and you get them instantly.

This may be all bad for the labels, middlemen, and record stores. But it is good for the artists and consumers. Time has changed and will change the market, and as an entrepeneur you have to stay current.

BTW. the music stores over here that primarily in more obscure music are doing well compared to all mainstream stores (who have switched to selling DVD movies, and games, markets that will die as well within a few years, given enough broadband capacity).

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[Digestromath]

Automobiles and the demise of horse aided travel didn't really put blacksmiths out of business. What it really did was differentiate between farriers and blacksmiths. A blacksmith is someone who works metal with a forge. A farrier is someone skilled in hoof care, which includes shoeing and potentially fabricating shoes.

Now at one point, it was well accepted that your rural blacksmith would be well versed as a farrier (made sense from a bussiness standpoint). However as horses became more rare, fewer blacksmiths picked up the trade. The two trades are more or less completely divergent now.

Now to say that both farriers and blacksmiths are out of bussiness is nonsense as well. There are many artisan blacksmiths out there creating wrought iron decorative pieces, collectable swords etc. Although many shoe thier own horses, there are still many professional farriers out there (servicing some rodeos, polo teams, riding stables etc).

If you insist on using the analogy though, lets talk about the pervasive use of the automobile putting wainwrights and used buggy salesmen out of bussiness.

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not quite sure what you mean by "hawked" (please feel free to elaborate), but the product a blacksmith was involved in was a method of transit (making the components of it) designed to make moving between two distant points more easily. Cars do the same thing, without the blacksmith - thus while its not their own product that they don't get a return on directly, they've been overtaken in the market and they'll stand to lose alot or all of their return on their own product anyway, since nobody's buying it.

It's not a perfect analogy - there really is no such thing as a perfect analogy - but you can quite easily say a similar situation is occuring in the music business. If we sidestep piracy/theft/whateveryouwanttocallit for a moment, there once was an old music sales model revolving around a storage device called the record. The record was mostly overtaken by the compact disc for music storage and delivery because it has various advantages which make a record "obselete" to the general consumer, though not totally, and it can still thrive in a more specialist market (just like the horse and cart, funnily enough). Now the CD is being overtaken by downloads, because its a more appealing and easier point of sale for the consumer, or it's becoming as such at least.

CDs aren't surviving so much though because they're the same data as that which is being sold via downloads. Specialists (or, most specialists) will want records for (supposedly? I don't know, I've never looked into it) better quality sound and so on, which CDs don't provide. The only thing a CD does which a downloaded MP3 doesn't do is provide a more "real-world" method of storing the data out of the box, but with CD writers people can backup their own music if they want to.

There really seems to be a less caring attitude about the ability to listen to recorded music too. If someone is interested enough, listening to that music live is more appealing usually - the same applies for movies. Of course, if someone can't they'll usually be quite happy to buy it anyway if they like it enough, but right now they don't need to go to a record store to buy it...they can just pay for a download. It's cheaper, quicker, less travelling, less physical world clutter and easier portability between devices.

From this point, to looking at piracy, we could go anywhere. There are too many factors to really determine what the cause and effect of piracy is (at least as far as I'm concerned - I'm sure many people will happily claim to know more about the situation, even if they don't have a clue), but that last point is something record companies (look, I'm going to call them publishers from now on, because that's what they are) keep wanting to take away from people, not really caring about the objections or the unintended effects of their actions. Will taking away device restrictions and letting people use their paid-for music how they want (even if its not in a way you like) really have an effect? Allow me to bounce out of the music discussion for a moment and to a little anecdote from the games industry...: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1311

There's text in that link, and some people wont bother, so here's the abbreviated version:

To paraphrase brutally, Piracy doesn't matter. Only sales matter. ...
That's the problem with piracy. What gets made targets people who buy it, not the people who would never buy it in the first place. When someone complains about "fat borders" on some popular WindowBlinds skin my question is always "Would you buy WindowBlinds even if there was a perfect skin for you?" and the answer is inevitably "Probably not". That's how it works in every market -- the people who buy stuff call the shots. Only in the PC game market are the people who pirate stuff still getting the overwhelming percentage of development resources and editorial support.

Or, in shorter for the people that seem to have trouble reading

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[ozmanjusri]

It lacks an adequate production arm.

Live music and self publishers.

The cost of releasing a track has dropped to almost nothing. With an $800 Boss solid-state recording deck and a laptop, we have tools that are an order of magnitude better than whole recording studios from a decade ago.

If the majors had reduced their prices to match the drop in costs, they might have kept a place in the market. As it is, their greed and stupidity means they deserve to die.

Oddly enough though, our band still produces CDs for local fans to buy at gigs, and they sell well despite the tracks being freely available on the web. A little goodwill goes a long way, I suspect.

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[archshade]

I download lots of music put up for free download by small bands. After downloading I listen to the tracks and make a personal choice on if the band is worth listening to. If they are I'm likely to buy a hole range of things including
-Gig tickets
-T-shirts
-physical CDs with artwork and books and all that stuff

so there are people who will pirate entire albums but i think theres lots of people like me who would never here of bands without free downloads. If I never here of a band i wont buy anything!

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[Gordonjcp]

I hate to break it to you, but U87s aren't that good. Also, it's a bloody microphone. It doesn't matter what you sing into if you can't sing or if you can sing but you choose to sing the mind-numbing drivel that the majors seem to want to put out.

Personally I can't *wait* until the majors go out of business. I'm going to pirate my socks off until all the record companies disappear up their own arseholes. Maybe then there will be a reduction in the saccharine pap that invades our eardrums.

Re:Well, piracy hurts real people.

[sm62704]

Oh come on, this troll was posted (and bittten) last year. As trolls go it isn't bad but gees, your troll was copyrighted last year when its original author trolled with it. You are in violation of copyright law, you filthy pirate!

Our lawyers will be coming for you and your grandmother and your handicapped son shortly. I believe we MIGHT be able to settle for $3,000 but if you force us to take you to court it's going to be a HUNDRED GRAND.