Google and Amazon clouds were relieved on Monday when the federal court judge ruled that there was no violation of copyright laws in case of MP3tunes cloud music service. The case was registered as MP3tunes made use of only a single MP3 copy in its library, instead of keeping an individual copy for each user. The decision might provide a small relief for Dropbox, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Google Music, but it is significant enough to smoothen their proceedings.
These cloud music services can now march ahead and provide their users with the convenience of using the services, without covering more disk space for an individual user. As it is now a legal act, new customers would be interested in using cloud services. The users would even be able to add in songs as per their preference which are found on various webpages. One can even make use of the cloud service provider’s search option which would be accessible with a single-click. The decision would even keep these additions safe of being sued by the actual record labels.
The decision which came out on Monday had its focus on cloud-based online music locker service, MP3tunes. This service provided users with a provision to make uploads of music via their hard drive which would be transferred to a web “locker”. The user would then in future anytime come back and play a song with the help on any connected device. The procedure here was simpler when the same song was previously uploaded by someone else. If yes, then the song would not be uploaded again. It would just be added to the locker of a user. The count does not matter in this case as only a single copy would be kept in the library. MP3tunes was sued by Electromagnetic interference (EMI) for the said practice.
Even thought the decision of the court was a bit complicated, but the end result was in favor of MP3tunes. The only condition was that the single copy which is saved should be an exactly unique copy. This would mean that if an MP3 “Stairway to Heaven” was bought via Amazon, the library would have to keep the file exactly the same (as determined by an MD5 Hash). If in this case another user rips a copy of “Stairway to Heaven” which has a slight difference even in the file size, the user will have to upload it on their own and it would be stored in the library.
The decision may not make any real sense, but for Dropbox, Amazon and Google it would be an appreciable decision. Unlike MP3tunes, Dropbox has never been dragged into any legal complication by a record label. Still, Dropbox makes use of the same service as does MP3tunes. The procedure is exactly the same in case of Dropbox. Dropbox could have anytime faced a similar problem which MP3tunes did face.
Talking about Google and Amazon, they came up with their music services which was launched of late, but they did not strike any deal with the labels. Procedure here makes it compulsory for each and every user to have their song uploaded which does not consider the earlier uploads made in the library. They were therefore wasting a lot of bandwidth space for each and every user. Now, with this decision, they would be able to use the same procedures and save space.