Monday, August 22nd 2011
News: Streaming Ain't A Crime
Courts Rule In Favor Of Cloud Music
A month ago, we broke down what we called the “war on innovation” in which Hollywood has oppressed Silicon Valley for the past decade and change. Today, the inevitable yet long-overdue end of that war finally eased into the home stretch.
As Spotify, Google Music, Amazon Cloud Player and Apple iCloud collectively stage a game-changing coup d’état this year, a key legal precedent that the more independent services were built on remained threatened by the yet-to-come ruling in EMI’s case against MP3Tunes, one of the first cloud music services, as we explained in our little dissertation.
Today, a Federal judge decided the case largely in favor of MP3Tunes, reinforcing the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as well as the legal precedent set by the Cablevision ruling of 2008.
Amazon and Google can finally exhale, and users of their new services have a lot less to worry about when it comes to the question of whether or not the record labels will be able to fuck them up like they have everything else.
At first glance, it may seem to render Apple’s costly deals with the labels obsolete; after all, if it’s not illegal to do it without permission, why is Apple paying for permission? However, there are still a few technical caveats that will give Apple little edges over their competition thanks to their unique label deals. At worst, these deals are only a little less valuable.
Congratulations to MP3Tunes and Silicon Valley. And thanks- for sticking up for music listeners in all of the ways that the major labels have not. This country’s most powerful tech companies been fighting for the right to innovate, and now that they have it, the entertainment industry may finally get the kick in the ass it’s been begging for.