MP3Tunes' Day in Court

MP3TUNES TRIUMPHS, SORT OF: Michael Robertson finally got his day in court when his original cloud-based music locker, MP3tunes, was ruled protected by DMCA safe harbor provisions, in a federal ruling issued yesterday in Manhattan. The long-running case, which pitted Robertson against EMI Group, saw U.S. District judge William Pauley rule that the 33,000 affected works have been reduced by about 99%, according to the controversial tech pioneer. While the company was protected by DMCA statutes, MP3tunes was still found liable on several counts, saddling Robertson personally and the company with potentially tens of millions of dollars in reparation, though the ruling insisted users can legally transfer material to their lockers, even from illicit P2P sites, without the ISP having to conduct its own infringement investigations. The ruling has tremendous implications for similar cloud-based services launched by Amazon and Google. "MP3tunes does not use a 'master copy' to store or play back songs stored in its lockers," Pauley ruled. "Instead, MP3tunes uses a standard data compression algorithm that eliminates redundant digital data." Expect an appeals round to follow, where majors will certainly challenge some of those findings. (8/23a)