MP3tunes

» see mp3tunes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

mp3tunes never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it was a us-first cloud locker running on billing rails that mostly assumed a us credit card and a us broadband line, and the whole legal fight that shaped it played out under us copyright law. i was on ttnet broadband by 2006 with my own mp3 collection ripped from cds and downloaded from filesharing, and i handled backup with an external hard drive and a burned dvd. paying $40 a year to put the same collection on a stranger's server was not how the calculation worked in ankara.

michael robertson launched mp3tunes in february 2005 out of san diego, four years after selling mp3.com to vivendi universal for $385m and getting sued off the front page by the major labels for the beam-it feature. the pitch for mp3tunes was almost the same idea with the legal argument tightened: users upload their own files, users play them back, the company is a hoster not a distributor. the flagship product was oboe, a cloud music locker that could sync your library across devices. the companion product was sideload.com, which let anyone save a legal mp3 they had found on the open web straight into their oboe locker without downloading it locally first.

emi sued in november 2007. capitol records v mp3tunes ran for seven years across the southern district of new york, hitting every major dmca safe-harbor question at once. was cloud sync fair use if the user uploaded their own file. was sideload contributory infringement if the target file was already on someone else's server. did red-flag knowledge apply to a hoster that had never listened to the tracks. the trial court ruled in mp3tunes' favor on most of the safe-harbor issues in 2011. robertson kept getting hit with personal liability rulings on the parts he lost. by april 2012 the legal bills were bigger than the company. mp3tunes inc filed chapter 7 on 27 april 2012 with $7,750 in assets and $2.1m in claims.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the sideload trick ~

sideload.com was the interesting piece. before it, moving an mp3 you had found on a fan site into a cloud locker meant downloading the file to your machine and re-uploading it to the locker. sideload cut out the middle: paste the url, the mp3tunes server fetched it directly. the tech worked. the legal theory was that if the source file was on the open web then the fetch was equivalent to the user doing it themselves. emi did not agree. the appeals court eventually split the question, saying sideload could be fine for some tracks and infringement for others depending on what the labels had already told mp3tunes to take down.

~ what survived ~

the direct successor pattern is amazon cloud player and google music both shipping in 2011 with itunes match later that same year, all launching with cloud-locker features while mp3tunes was still fighting for the right to sell one. amazon and apple licensed the labels first. mp3tunes had proven that if you did not, you spent your revenue on lawyers instead of on servers. robertson himself lost a personal $41m damages ruling in march 2014, two years after the company was already dead, which was one of the last individual copyright judgments of that scale against a music-service founder in the pre-streaming era.

~ the pattern ~

this is robertson's second cloud-music-locker company that got sued to death, on almost the same claim, by almost the same music-industry plaintiffs. the mp3.com beam-it feature was killed by the same argument twelve years earlier. the fact that he built it a second time is either principled or reckless depending on where you stand. what it definitely was is early. every product that shipped a cloud music locker without label licensing after 2012 knew exactly what it was signing up for.

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