From Wired — a rarity nowadays: a slightly positive move in copyright law:
Amazon, Dropbox, Google and You Win in Cloud-Music Copyright Decision
The disk drives powering Dropbox, Amazon’s Cloud Drive, and Google Music likely issued a small sigh of relief Monday, after a federal court judge found that the MP3tunes cloud music service didn’t violate copyright laws when it used only a single copy of a MP3 on its servers, rather than storing 50 copies for 50 users.
For Amazon and Google’s nascent cloud music services, the decision clears the way for them to make it easier and faster for customers to use their music services; gives them legal cover to reduce the amount of disk space needed per user; makes it less likely that new customers of their music services will bust through their ISPs data caps when signing up; and clears the way for the companies to let users add songs found on webpages and through search to their lockers with a single-click — all without either being sued by record labels for doing so.
Monday’s decision centers on MP3tunes, a cloud-based online music locker service, that allows a customer to upload the music from their hard drives to a “locker” on the web, where they can play back the songs from any connected device.
But instead of uploading all of a user’s songs, MP3tunes’ software would check the library for previously uploaded songs and if a match existed, the song would just be added to the locker without requiring an upload. No matter how many customers “uploaded” that song, MP3tunes kept only a single copy.
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