Michael Robertson To Release Music Locker Service
Sounds like a news flash from 2000, doesn’t it?
Michael Robertson’s current project, MP3Tunes.com, is apprently poised to release a music locker service called Oboe. Robertson posted a teaser screenshot on his blog.
I assume that Robertson and new employee DVD-Jon have come up with some fiendishly clever way around the holding of UMG v. MP3.com, which held that the my.mp3.com music locker service infringed record companies’ copyrights because it copied and replayed the music without permission and without a valid fair use defense. I’m reluctant to speculate based on a pre-release screenshot, but the “Quarantine” and “Webload” buttons look intriguing.
Robertson has said he’ll release Oboe by the end of the year. I look forward to seeing what he’s come up with.
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To be technical, MP3.com is binding precedent only against MP3.com itself. It’s a District Court opinion, which means that even the judge who issued it is free to disregard it in a future case against anyone else. So it’s really a question of whether Oboe has found a way around the theory of fair use embodied in the holding in MP3.com or whether it’s pinning its legal hopes on convincing later courts that MP3.com was wrongly decided.
Comment by James Grimmelmann — 30 November 2005 @ 06:21
Absolutely right, as usual. But I think it would be especially foolhardy to open a service identical to my.mp3.com without some distinguishing characteristic, not because the mp3.com opinion binds later courts, but because the reasoning of the mp3.com opinion, while wrong, was not outlandishly wrong and seems likely to persuade a later court unwilling to dive in to the difficult questions locker services pose about personal fair use and agency. It would also be a poor rhetorical move to set up a service just outside the bounds of res judicata.
Comment by Joe Gratz — 30 November 2005 @ 09:35