Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/cloudmusic-is-not-a-crime/

by radley • 15 years ago

105 32 15 years ago

sunchild• 15 years ago

Here's the actual decision: http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&i...

It looks like EMI prevailed on some claims, but not the claim that de-duplicated storage is itself a copyright violation.

shaggyfrog2• 15 years ago

Strange how they left iCloud out of the story completely. I hear that service is somewhat related and will be used by at least a few dozen people.

Qz• 15 years ago

Not strange considering that the court case in question involved a label vs a provider -- Apple has deals with the providers which makes this case (legally) irrelevant to iCloud.

trun2• 15 years ago

Did they...?

"By contrast, Apple’s new cloud-music service — created with the blessing of the big labels, only uploads the songs it doesn’t know — and uses master files. In fact, if a customer has a low-quality copy of a song from one of those labels, Apple will automatically upgrade the song to a better one."

Besides, this ruling has very little effect on iCloud since it's already sanctioned by the music labels. What else would you have liked for them to say about iCloud?

alf2• 15 years ago

They that comment is really one sided too, because only keeping a master copy cuts both ways. If you have a high quality rip, using the master copy will "downgrade" the song quality.

shaggyfrog2• 15 years ago

Sorry, I should rephrase. In a story about cloud file storage and cloud services, with the world "cloud" in the heading, it seems odd that they decided not to bother to use the name for the service: iCloud.

rwl4• 15 years ago

Isn't this the very legal issue which cost MP3.com it's business years ago?

carussell3• 15 years ago

The guy behind Mp3tunes, Michael Robertson, is the same guy who founded MP3.com. The decision addresses the distinction:

> EMI argues that MP3tunes' storage system violates its right to public performance, because, much like Robertson's earlier effort at online music storage with MP3.com, MP3tunes employs a "master copy" to rebroadcast songs to users who uploaded different copies of the same song. ... EMI's argument, however, mischaracterizes MP3tunes' storage system. The record demonstrates that MP3tunes does not use a "master copy" to store or play back songs stored in its lockers. Instead, MP3tunes uses a standard data compression algorithm that eliminates redundant digital data. Importantly, the system preserves the exact digital copy of each song uploaded to MP3tunes.com.

ryandvm2• 15 years ago

Wow. What a fucking pointless distinction. I despise businesses that survive solely by inhibiting the progress of others.

kragen• 15 years ago

Yes: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/news/2000/04/35933

> The lawsuit brought by the RIAA and filed in the Southern District of New York claims that MP3.com created an illegal database of 45,000 CDs, which the company purchased and uploaded on to MP3.com's servers. The suit sought to shut down the service.

> Users who sign up for the my.mp3.com service are able to stream music from that database to any device that can access the Internet.

> "We think this is a loss for the labels," Robertson said during a conference call Friday. "When a responsible system like my.mp3.com, which requires people to buy the CDs before they can listen to the music is potentially halted, that leaves a vacuum for other services like Napster and Gnutella -- which don't protect artists -- to flourish." ...

> Users cannot access music from MP3.com's database until they load a physical CD that contains the album into their computer.

riobard• 15 years ago

This just shows how plain stupid music labels are in the age of Internet. Seriously, store 50,000 copies of the same file? Insane.

barkingcat• 15 years ago

Yes it's stupid - but for the music labels, it's like this

"We have to store 50,000 copies of the same music on CD's and records in order to sell them, which takes up retail space and storage space - so you must do the same thing too! Amazon, Google, you guys better buy 50,000 hard drives to store the music, otherwise you guys are cheating!"

If the music industry wasn't so inflexible maybe HMV and music retailers can move to "cd's on demand" or "ipods on demand" where they provide a stack of blank cd's or allow you to plug your ipod/iphone/media player in store and buy the music right at the music shop where the Music industry can control the user experience (ie they can have kiosks, signed merchandise like t-shirts, etc on the side for impulse buys, etc) - it's like the nintendo stores - just with music stuff.

Just this move alone possibly can save indie music stores, but no ... the music industry is so backwards.

bennesvig• 15 years ago

In an interview I read a month or two ago, I remember Seth Godin recently saying that a top music executive told him that he thought CD's would make a comeback...

SoftwareMaven• 15 years ago

Just like records, eight tracks and cassettes...

bostonvaulter2• 15 years ago

It's not completely insane. There is a very good article titled "What Colour are your bits?":

http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php

trun2• 15 years ago

I hope this encourages Dropbox to venture further into streaming services. I store my entire music library in Dropbox, but I've never come across a feasible way to access that media on the go / from my mobile devices.

On the other hand, Cloud Drive nailed that use case perfectly, but getting my music into the system would require lots of tedious manual uploading.

alf2• 15 years ago

Having used Amazon Cloud Player quite a bit, as well as other similar web services (lala, grooveshark), I can say that Cloud Player is the worst web based music player I've used. Can anyone comment on Google Music, or iCloud?

trustfundbaby• 15 years ago

I just want apple to make my itunes collection available to me on any computer I'm on ... hopefully that happens sometime soon, so I don't have to pick the songs/albums/playlists I want to listen to that week and sync them to my iphone.

moultano• 15 years ago

Google music is great. No complaints. (well one, I don't have album art for everything I've ripped in a format that it groks.)

aphexairlines• 15 years ago

Why are you unhappy with Cloud Player?

watty• 15 years ago

Google Music seems to work well (and works great on a TouchPad) but I still haven't gotten 1/50th of my music collection uploaded.

carussell3• 15 years ago

The details matter here, so far as the decision is that if they are bit-for-bit duplicates, there's no need to store more than one copy.

I was under the impression that the bit-for-bit duplicates weren't the only things Google et al had their sights on though, i.e., they were hoping to do something along the lines of iCloud. Was I mistaken?

In any case, it's a shame that it was necessary to go through the judicial hoopla to determine that it's okay to practice what's more commonly known as "compression".

SODaniel• 15 years ago

Undoubtedly great for those services who cross deduplicate data.

As a user however, I think it's a little 'scary' as it per default requires the service provider to have access to encryption/decryption information, hence no 'zero-knowledge' storage policy is possible.

Dylan16807• 15 years ago

Someone before proposed a deduplication scheme where the hash of a file is used as an encryption key. (and an encrypted database of keys is accessible by the user only) It's not no-knowledge in terms of what files are the same, of course, but it keeps the actual contents safe from prying.

carbonica2• 15 years ago

> However, the ruling makes clear that if MP3tunes scanned a customer’s music collection and found “Stairway to Heaven” ripped from a CD with a slightly different file size, the company could not simply substitute a master copy. Instead, that customer would have to upload the file.

> While the latter case still seems non-sensical, the ruling still must come as a relief to Google, Amazon and Dropbox.

Come on, how is that non-sensical? It'd be dead simple to set the ID3 tags of any 4MB mp3 file to match the tags accepted for a given song. From what I read, and the legalspeak got pretty heavy so I may have missed it, there wasn't any discussion of audio fingerprinting or more advanced ways to determine two files are the same song.

Want an entire artist's discography? Use a 15KB app which spits out 100 junk MP3 files with the right ID3 tags and submit them to MP3Tunes. If we do what this author considers "sensical," you should get the real music back.

meow• 15 years ago

The article was mentioning md5 hashes of songs to find the matches. Besides, its not a question of whether the system can be foolproof.

carbonica2• 15 years ago

But what I pulled out from the Wired article amounted to "it's silly that if the file sizes are slightly different you need to upload your whole song." If file sizes are different, the MD5 will be wrong in nearly all cases. They're talking about something different in that paragraph than you are.

grellas• 15 years ago

The court gives a broad reading to the DMCA safe-harbor provisions in the context of a music-locker service. In this sense, it does for music storage what the Viacom/YouTube case did for video storage - it severely limits the duty of a host to police its site for infringing content of users based on loosey-goosey standards or based on fuzzily-worded takedown notices (e.g., "remove all songs by . . .").

Another way of putting this: if the host does not knowingly countenance infringing acts, and if it diligently complies with takedown notices identifying specific items that are infringing, it is immunized from liability for infringement, whether direct, contributory, or vicarious. In other words, Congress passed the DMCA to facilitate the growth and maintenance of robust internet services and the courts will give the law its proper force notwithstanding the efforts of content providers to try to finagle new revenues through aggressive lawsuits attacking the services. In this sense, the opinion is a well-reasoned extension of Viacom, which was decided last year in favor of Google and YouTube on a grant of summary judgment (my comments on Viacom: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1456757). Here too the decision was on summary judgment (what summary judgment means: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1457388).

At the same time, MP3tunes got nailed here for failing to follow up properly on the takedown notices in the sense of taking steps to remove properly identified infringing materials from the lockers of users. On this point, the court granted judgment for EMI based on affidavits alone and held MP3tunes liable even without a trial. Again, a big part of the court's reasoning was devoted to this point.

On a final note, the copyright law is complex on the issue of de-duplicating storage (a previous comment of mine on this is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2535137; for some commentary by EFF, see here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/current-music-locker-s...). Common sense, of course, dictates that a user who has already bought a piece of music, who uploads it into a service, and who enjoys listening to it through that service is doing nothing more than getting the benefit of something legally purchased. The problem is that law often fails to keep up with changing technology. Thus, well-established copyright principles (decided years ago in the offline world) say that one engages in a "public performance" if he uses one copy of a copyrighted item to enable members of the public to view or listen to it serially (this is the so-called "master copy" reference mentioned in the decision). Of course, it is not really "one copy" if each user individually uploads his own copy and then replays it. But is it the user's own copy if it is de-duplicated? This decision says it is but this is by no means a foregone conclusion under the law and that is why Amazon and Google have taken the conservative route and have not used de-duplication. In fact, it is an area of great uncertainty. This decision, good as it is on the point, does not change that. This is a trial court decision that has no legally binding effect beyond its impact on the parties immediately before the court. It will be appealed and who knows what will happen at the next level? I would seriously doubt that major services like Google's will think themselves safe to de-duplicate their storage just yet.

All in all, a very good decision but very likely not the final word on these issues.

Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision

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