In the latest sad attempt by record companies to try and sue everyone, primarily all music fans and music technology forward companies, of copyright infringement – they appear to have won A battle in a long drawn out war.

According to Timothy B. Lee, in his article: Record labels get hollow victory in MP3tunes infringement case -

“A federal judge today found the online music locker service MP3tunes and its founder Michael Robertson liable for copyright infringement. On paper, that’s a victory for lead plaintiff EMI and its fellow record labels. But the judge’s decision leaves them with little else to cheer about.”

What this all apparently means is that Michael Robertson (owner of MP3tunes) got busted for not removing the songs that record labels notified him of as being infringing material from his users personal music lockers.  He removed them from the search results, but not from the lockers of individual users who had already gotten the material – or from his own music locker, which he was also busted for.

However, MP3tunes was able to get protection from the DMCA:

“Under the DMCA, websites are immune from copyright liability if they promptly take down infringing material when notified by copyright holders and meet certain other criteria. MP3tunes argued it qualified for this safe harbor. EMI tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Judge Pauley otherwise.”

All in all it was pretty monumental for MP3tunes and other similar companies, as EMI desperately tried to argue against allowing MP3tunes to be protected by the DMCA – and lost, which I think this is the most important piece of this battle.  If the ruling continues to hold throughout the appeal process, this will definitely be a precedent setting case for other music locker companies.

I also think this article touches upon a really interesting turn of events for the big record labels.  Hopefully the music industry will someday start working with the fans and technology instead of going against it, and suing all of their customers.

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Well, it’s always been on the cards, but the biggest news of the week is that Apple have finally been able to make iTunes tracks available without the Digital Rights Management that was essentially ‘watermarked’ into all previous tracks.

So you can now buy a tune from iTunes and play it on Microsoft’s Zune player or similar by SanDisk. It really took us until 2009 to get to that stage? The major labels and countless independents have been selling DRM-free tracks via Amazon for about a year, so why did they hold out on Apple?

Steve Jobs announced that EMI were willing to drop DRM back in 2007, but the rest of the majors (Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment) have held out for some unknown reason. Actually, the reason is know; it’s because majors have no idea how to move forward in this music evolution. They were unwilling to hand over DRM-free copies to iTunes because of the scale of it’s sales, fearing a loss of control and rampant, escalating piracy. They struggle to keep hold of things like DRM so that people don’t ‘steal their money’.

Here’s a thought. Will Apple’s news make much difference? The people who already buy millions of tracks from iTunes are doing so (mostly) happily and playing them on their millions of iPods and iPhones. As far as they know (or care), DRM has never been an issue. People who have wanted to download DRM-free music for their non-Apple devices have been able to find it fairly easily. Will these settled buyers bother to jump ship? Especially with the new price rises too (more on that later). The infamous Bob Lefsetz thinks the news is very much a non-issue, saying that “the only people who care about DRM don’t pay for music, they just steal it. Otherwise, Amazon would have eclipsed Apple and the Seattle company would own the online music market”.

Is it all too-little too-late?

Lee Jarvis.

Cross-posted at our Music Jobs website in the UK

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