Earlier this week a federal judge presiding over EMI's copyright infringement lawsuit against MP3tunes dismissed the label's claim that the file locker service does not qualify for DMCA safe harbor protection.
Safe harbors are intended to shield service providers from third party liability for copyright infringement. In other words, if someone infringes using your service, there is no ... [ read the full article ]
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This sounds like EMI's attempt to place restrictions on cloud files. Or to say it in a rattle-trap fashion, what's to keep an individual from moving his/her music (or data) from one cloud & copying it to another cloud location? This litigation is a foreshadowing attempt to minimize (if not stop entirely) this kind of file/data relocation from the label's micromanaged control.
However, it seems that this judge is dangerously close to mandating that service providers be the police & act as the gavel from under the thumb of a Label's unconstitutional rule (i.e., EMI or RIAA makes the judicial call & act as their own law enforcement agency).
I'm really getting tired of corporations acting like their small emperors throughout the world, invoking their own brand of law & justice as they see fit. I swear they sound like winy teenagers complaining about what they 'feel' is right as apposed to what actually is.
It's a shame that these rulings are all based on "luck of the draw" for both the records and the defendants. It depends on if the records get a judge that sympathize with them or not...always always.
Quote: Although MP3tunes removed the infringing links from Sideload, it chose not to block any of its users from having unrestricted access to infringing copies of Plaintiffs' recordings stored in users lockers. Those users remained free to download and experience those infringing copies from MP3tunes' servers. Thus, there is no genuine dispute that MP3tunes had actual knowledge its users had stored and continued to have access to infringing copies of Plaintiffs' works.
Just one little issue there...people are allowed to upload their purchased music to clouds for personal access, and the record labels do not have the right to force them to remove their purchased music from the cloud unless others are accessing it illegally (thus the public links were removed). This is why the "infringing" files were not removed.
This judge is certainly on the side of the cartels, otherwise he would have just thrown this case out.
