
Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision - radley
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/08/cloudmusic-is-not-a-crime/
======
grellas
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...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/current-music-locker-
services-will-not-save)). 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.

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

~~~
bennesvig
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
Just like records, eight tracks and cassettes...

~~~
earbitscom
Actually, records are making a comeback. Sales up over 40% so far this year.
;)

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sunchild
Here's the actual decision:
[http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&i...](http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/cases/show.php?db=special&id=125)

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

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

~~~
carbonica
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.

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trun
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.

~~~
alf
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?

~~~
moultano
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.)

~~~
ryandvm
Google Music works great at what it's intended to do. Play _your_ music from
anywhere.

That said, I've recently realized that I don't really like my music. That is,
I'm much more interested in effective music discovery apps like Pandora,
Grooveshark, and Turntable.fm.

Can't wait to see the Google+ spin on Google Music...

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rwl4
Isn't this the very legal issue which cost MP3.com it's business years ago?

~~~
carussell
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.

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

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carussell
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
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
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.

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shaggyfrog
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.

~~~
trun
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?

~~~
shaggyfrog
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.

~~~
carussell
iCloud isn't mentioned because the article isn't about iCloud. iCloud is the
name of one service from Apple, whose logistics renders this case irrelevant
to that product, as explained by trun and Qz.

