Capitol Records Flooded Internet With MP3s, Says MP3Tunes CEO

NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "In court papers filed in New York in Capitol Records v. MP3Tunes, the CEO of MP3Tunes, Michael Robertson, has accused the plaintiffs EMI, Capitol Records, and other EMI record labels of flooding the internet with free MP3s of their songs for promotional purposes, 'free to everyone (except, apparently, MP3tunes).' His 10-page declaration (PDF) provides exact details of specific song files, including the URLs from which they are being distributed free of charge, both by paid content distributors, and by EMI itself from its own web sites."

Comments

What am I missing here???

[NecroPuppy]

Aren't the songs EMI / Capitol's to do with as they wish?

Including give them away, by whatever methods they choose?

Obviously, I'm missing a legal facet here; what is it?

Re:What am I missing here???

[Anonymous Coward]

EMI / Capitol is apparently having this lawsuit with MP3Tunes for MP3Tunes distributing the songs EMI had up for free download.

Essentially EMI is telling MP3Tunes they can't distribute that content.

MP3Tunes looks like it's following the idea of 'You gave it away so we can give it away too'. Sort of like the third party market. You buy a product from someone and thus you can resell that product if you want.
EMI gave away the mp3 via downloads to MP3Tunes for free so MP3Tunes posted them and gave them away for free to.
EMI is objecting to this because MP3Tunes is not owned by them and thus they lose some distribution control (and ads and such from their sites, I presume).

Re:What am I missing here???

[BrianRoach]

what's a reasonable assumption?

That copyright law still applies? That would be my "reasonable" assumption.

Unless they grant you the right to re-distribute their copyrighted works, you don't have one.

There is no implicit right to re-distribute even if you are given a copy of something for free.

Re:What am I missing here???

[Sloppy]

True but irrelevant. Apparently EMI is suing Robertson for the initial act of EMI distributing the file. There is no "re-" prefix on that verb.

Analogy: You tell someone to go to a bookstore (a new one, not even a used one, let's say) and buy a book, they follow your advice and purchase the book, and then the copyright holder of the book sues you for telling people to buy the book. We're talking about the first sale itself, not even a disagreement about what can be done after the first sale. Wow.

Re:What am I missing here???

[spazdor]

You absolutely, certainly have the right to give something you downloaded to someone else, provided you do not also keep a copy. This does not violate copyright in any way.

Re:What am I missing here???

[sjames]

IANL but I think the idea here is that you can't really claim to have been grievously harmed if someone hands out free copies of a song you're already handing out for free. It could even be argued that they saved you some bandwidth charges.

Here we go.....

[zappepcs]

I am thinking that 2009 is going to be a very interesting year for the RIAA's legal team. Who hasn't heard/read about the latest foibles from the record companies and I'm willing to bet that this one won't be the last.

Monopolistic practices? Unfair trade practices? Come on now! The RIAA and it's members would NEVER do anything like that. How many here wonder how many tune/files were seeded to P2P networks by the RIAA members themselves never mind paid third parties so that their 'investigative' group could actually find file sharers? Can you say Enron? Yeah, I know it's not even close to the same thing, but I am betting it breaks open as big in the news and it's after affects when the real truth of what big record labels have been up to for the last 5 years.

Take what Sony did. There is an example of how unscrupulous they really are. Imagine the money that they have and they don't have employees that know it was not just morally bad, but illegal? Ignorance of the law is not acceptable in court.... unless you have several hundred million dollars to buy things for legislators holidays and such.

Like my great grandfather used to say... "The shit you see when you don't have a gun... damn"

He was of course talking about deer on the side of the road, which is close to road kill, and I hope that is what 2009 will label the RIAA, so it kind of fits.

Re:Here we go.....

[danlor]

orly? Price fixing? Extortion? Abuse of power? Collusion?

Does this open your eyes?

Re:Here we go.....

[zappepcs]

I'm curious. How do you explain the root kit on Sony CDs with ignorance or stupidity? Anyone that stupid should not be in business. period. The Sony legal team has enough experience to protect trademarks, read the news, and study the laws. Any software release that was not run through the legal team opens the company to unknown litigation costs. When you have that much to lose, being stupid is not an option.

Enron, as I mentioned them, is but one example of a big business going out of their way to screw over customers and employees alike. I don't think it's so hard to imagine that executives at Sony and other record companies are just as immoral and unscrupulous. In fact, it's rather easy. Yes, you can go ahead and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt, but I won't and there are a lot of people feeling the same way. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me... or if you like, once bitten, twice shy. Oh, then there is an old fav: A leopard does not change his spots. If you are familiar with them, Metallica has a song about a scorpion which seems rather appropriate.

If you believe that this is about enforcing copyrights... I'm aghast. After all that the RIAA and members have done, now saying who can have free downloads? That's not copyright, it's tantamount to saying 'here is a free MP3, but you can't use it for anything other than listening alone to it at home. A completely unrealistic expectation under current and all foreseeable copyright laws.

If Ford gave you a free car but then said you can't put any bumper stickers on it, would you tell them to fuck off? Anyone else can put bumper stickers on the free cars we gave them, but not you! This is the thing about public domain. Once a thing is released to the public domain you have lost control of how it is then distributed.

There is little if any difference between reality here and having a site that has advertisements on it that points (with deep links) to sites that have free MP3 files, although that is a bit cheap, using someone else's bandwidth for the actual downloads. Point remains. If it's free for downloading, it doesn't matter one iota how the downloader finds the link.

Regardless of how unsavory this company might actually be, this is wrong of EMI, and should they win it would set a very bad precedent for copyrights, patents, and many other things with regard to the public domain and 'things' released to the public domain with no license. You can indeed follow a URL link to the actual file and not be presented a EULA or license, so whether they intended it that way or were just stupid, they are free for downloading and free of licensing, and therefore EMI has lost distribution rights of any kind.

Para 15 says it all really:
                              In short, EMI has engaged in active marketing of its music directly and through hundreds if not thousands of online music partners. As a consequence, thousands of EMI songs are available on the Internet for free download with its authorization. Yet EMI is seeking to impose liability upon MP3tunes because it runs a search engine that links to many of the same files. MP3tunes respectfully requests that EMIâ(TM)s motion to dismiss be denied.

So, "a pox on both their houses"?

[argent]

Even if he's "a scumbag" that doesn't mean that EMI are angels. Sometimes there aren't any good guys.

Re:First Sale Doctrine, maybe?

[ubrgeek]

Maybe there are exceptions, but not usually. When I would do music reviews the CDs we received were VERY clearly labeled, "For Promotional Purposes Only. Not For Sale."

Re:Compared to other heavyweights..

[GiMP]

The small guys do this too, to be honest. In my town, we have two small mom and pop coffee shops that are open for a few hours a day in the morning. They are not open when I'm looking for entertainment, and they don't provide internet (which if they did, I might go there earlier). In the biggest intersection in town, the corners consist of two gas stations, a park, and an empty lot (which is quite an eye-sore). Starbucks wanted to open there, but the small coffee shops lobbied to prevent the township from allowing the permits to build.

While generally, I would prefer having local businesses as opposed to mega-corporations like Starbucks, I cannot support local businesses that simply refuse to complete.

Re:What's NewYorkCountryLawyer's angle on this one

[NewYorkCountryLawyer]

NYCL I love you. I was surprised to find you were the older of the ones pictured on your website, thinking my elders didn't have a clue about technology. For that I am sorry. You are not on the side of your clients, at least not publically on riaavsamerica blog. You are on the side of what you believe to be true, based on of your countless university hours and countless hours in reality on top of that. There have been very few people, since I first became aware of politics in the early Clinton days, who took a stand on belief rather than financial or political gain. Your continued investment in the purely informative postings you continue to provide, as well as your cameo commentary on aggregators such as this, suggests you are trying to follow the law, as opposed to following the money. I could be biased, being on a certain side of the RIAA cause. But I have thought for a number of years -- no one in this country would give up their home for a cause. Few would go to jail for the confidentiality of their sources. If we had a civil war we would struggle to find someone to fight. Because everyone has a decent job, or at least most people do (unemployment isn't that high), and those who don't, don't automatically have to become toilet cleaners. Our economic status was, for a while, equal to none. And throughout that, you posted information, then questions, then support, then as we see here back to information again, for the good of... not yourself certainly. Please, do not humor me with a personal reply as you so frequently do here. Instead, accept the thanks of a million geeks who could not otherwise provide any feedback in any fashion. You are the last starfighter, the last true outpost in American society. If we can't understand the digital revolution and all of the intricacies that it introduces, we are in a world of hurt. And if "we" have cushy enough jobs and a reliable paycheck due to minimum wage hikes, there is no incentive to take the war into a public and therefore personal (or vice e versa) space. I see it with my colleagues and read about it here. No one wants to fight. So what if you were Skywalker? Or Mowgli? Or for shit's sake Neo... The fight is the same, the truth is the same, the enemy is the same. The fight is the same, and most people don't know it is happening. But if they knew where to look, they might have more than just a feeling.

Thank you for your kindness. But I am not the last starfighter, I am one of many. And when we are no longer here, there will be others to take our place.