Andre Yoskowitz
5 Oct 2008 17:15
New York District Judge William H. Pauley III has dismissed the RIAA's copyright infringment lawsuit against MP3Tunes' CEO Michael Robertson but has said the lawsuit against the company itself will go on as planned.
The lawsuit, brought forward by the RIAA on behalf of EMI and 14 other labels claims that MP3Tunes "infringed on copyrights as it offers an online music storage service, allowing users to upload their music collections and access them from virtually anywhere."
Robertson is quick to point out that much larger corporations offer the same exact service as his company does and that "MP3Tunes was targeted because of its comparatively small size, ensuring EMI an easier victory that would then be used to shut down similar services and cripple consumers’ rights." A few notable examples of other similar services are AOL’s Xdrive, Microsoft’s Skydrive and BT’s The Vault.
When the case is eventually ruled on it will determine whether customers can store their legally-obtained music in cloud services. MP3tunes currently has 150,000 customers who have uploaded their music into online "lockers." The music is then accessible from any web-enabled device.