EMI back in the news this time over file storage on line

“Stop the Madness” Susan Powter.

Saner heads have prevailed in the courts system as MP3Tunes.com wins a legal ruling against EMI getting copies of the some 300 terabytes of information that people have in their personal file stores on the companies backup site. If EMI had won, then basically they would have gotten some 300 TB of files user names, and other information that they really do not need to have.

What is interesting is the argument that was used to gain the defeat. That the personal space on an Internet connected hard drive is more like a safe deposit box than anything else, and there is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and that there is no way to share between storage boxes. They consider them selves a bank, which seemed to work.

Today, MP3tunes’ CEO Michael Robertson sent out an email to all users of the online music backup and place-shifting service MP3tunes.com, asking them to help publicize EMI’s ridiculous and ignorant lawsuit against the company. EMI believes that consumers aren’t allowed to store their music files online, and that MP3tunes is violating copyright law by providing a backup service. (And we’re not using a euphemism here—it really is a backup/place-shifting service and not a file sharing site in disguise.) Source: Consumerist

We all buy music on line and want to move it around a bit, if I have time at work to do things, like shop (which I don’t) then yes I am going to want to synch these to my authorized computer that has all my Itunes software at home. With boarder searches of computer systems now authorized, sites like MP3Tunes.com make more and more sense with one central location for files, that you can grab anywhere while you globe trot around the world or around the country and need to carry a flat formatted computer.

Glad they won, now time to go check them out.

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