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August 24, 2011
MP3tunes.com was ruled legitimate in a US court case brought forward by EMI. Launched in early 2005, MP3tunes.com offered a digital music locker service. The major point of contention was the track matching feature employed by the service: instead of uploading a separate version of every music track a user wanted to store and access through the locker, the company match the track against its existing library and thus minimise uploading and, in consequence, its operational costs. The service operated without licenses from music labels. The court ruled that as long as the files users wanted to upload were exact copies of the centrally store master copy, a label licensing for the track matching was unnecessary.
The court ruling carries immediate implications for the recently launched slew of cloud services from industry heavyweights Apple, Amazon and Google, as well as less well-publicised services like mSpot. Of the three big names, Apple is the only company to have obtained label licenses which allowed it to use track matching. Such feature would have given Apple a user experience advantage over competing locker services as it dramatically reduces the 'upload' time. With the new precedent set, Amazon and Google can adjust their services to employ the same mechanism. The ruling also potentially sets ground for 'matching' of other digital content and could have implications for the wider digital locker segment.
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