A lawsuit brought forth by recording industry giant EMI against MP3Tunes again raises some fundamental questions about digital music ownership and link aggregation.
EMI calls MP3Tunes and subsidiary Sideload.com “willful infringement of copyright over the Internet,” a claim that MP3Tunes CEO and founder Michael Robertson denies. Robertson equates Sideload to an audio search engine that links to where users can find music, similar to Google.
On his blog yesterday, Robertson describes Sideload this way:
Sideload is an audio search engine. It has links to audio files and shows you where those files are on the net. Sideload does not host any files. There are many, many such search engines….Many people simply use Google, which is likely the biggest audio search engine in the world. Any complaint against Sideload could be leveled against Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask since they all have links to song files.
Another point of contention in the lawsuit is MP3Tune’s Music Locker, an online storage service. While EMI contends that MP3Tunes makes unauthorized copies of digital audio files, Robertson differentiates by noting that users who own their music can store it on whatever device they please. Lockers are protected by user names and passwords, he adds, so they aren’t publicly accessible.
One interesting point of distinction in EMI’s suit, though, is that Sideload advertises on its site “Free Music On The Internet” and “424,337 Free tracks from 42,991 Artists.” Additionally, any of the songs listed on the website can be listened to without leaving the website, which may make it different from Google’s services.
Then again, indexing has held up in court over the years, which is, technically, copying Internet files. But it may not play in Robertson’s favor that he offered to remove the links EMI complained about before lawsuits were filed. EMI attorneys wanted “substantial” compensation instead.
It’s been just seven years since Robertson was sued by the music industry. The 2000 case, a row over MP3.com, was settled for $100 million and Robertson eventually sold MP3.com to Vivendi for just shy of $400 million. Vivendi then flipped the domain to CNet.
But Robertson notes the difference between his former business at MP3.com and his current business at MP3Tunes. In the late 1990’s, MP3.com hosted music files and they could be downloaded directly. MP3Tunes, he says, does not host any music files.
Robertson has described this new lawsuit as “retaliatory” after he filed suit against EMI to seek declaratory judgment that his business model is legitimate. EMI filed its suit shortly thereafter.
In interviews, Robertson has accused record labels of rushing to sue online music companies as lawyers seek to up their billable hours via drawn-out litigation. Instead, he says the recording industry should be looking to new ways of distribution in a more cooperative spirit.
He references specifically a technology developed through MP3.com that converted purchased CDs to MP3 files for listening while customers waited for the CD to be shipped. But the RIAA saw my.mp3.com as an illegal database of some 45,000 CDs.
“If the music industry would have adopted this technology, it could have extended the life of the CD another 10 years,” he writes. “But, it chose to sue MP3.com and missed a golden opportunity — CD sales are down a staggering 60 percent since that time. While MP3.com may be an interesting footnote in digital music history, MP3tunes is an entirely different company with different technology.”
Though that argument didn’t convince the judge back in 2000, Robertson is banking that his new service is covered by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, that it counts as an audio search engine, and that people have the right to store the music they own in whatever form and on whatever device they choose.
