14 DAY TRIAL // A US federal court judge handed out a ruling that could shape the future of cloud music and file storage services. In a lawsuit filed by EMI against music cloud locker service MP3Tunes, the court found mostly for MP3Tunes and said that it did not infringe on copyright by sharing only one copy of identical files uploaded by different users.
The ruling covers several implications, some specific to MP3Tunes, but the main ones affect pretty much everyone in the industry.
MP3Tunes enables users to upload their tracks to the cloud and then listen to them online. While each user only has access to their tracks, if a specific file has been uploaded by a user before, it won't get uploaded again, both users will get access to the one file.
This is only true for exact copies of the same song and the court found this practice to be legal. As long as MP3Tunes did not have a 'master copy' of a song which would then be served to all users who had the track, though not the exact file, on their hard drives, it was in the clear.
This ruling opens the way for companies such as Amazon or Google to improve their recently launched music locker services without fear of being sued.
Currently, both Amazon and Google store copies of each user's files. Even if there are several identical files, the companies will store all of the copies.
This means that they're using up more space than they'd really need, but also that users have to upload each and every track they own, something that can take days for large libraries and slow connections.
Amazon and Google do this because they have no licensing deal with record labels. Apple on the other hand has a license and it only stores one copy of any song for its iTunes Match service.
Similarly, Dropbox, the popular cloud sync and file sharing service, only stores one copy of identical files, regardless of their type. Before this ruling, it was under the threat of lawsuits.[via TechDirt]