Online Music Storage Firm MP3tunes Files For Bankruptcy 41
fishmike writes "Online music storage firm MP3tunes, Inc filed for bankruptcy in a U.S. court, following its prolonged run-in with music publishing giant EMI Group over copyright issues, court filings showed. MP3tunes is a so-called cloud music service that lets users store music in online 'lockers.' Amazon.com Inc, Apple Inc and Google Inc have similar cloud services."
Never heard of it (Score:2, Troll)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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Same here. [shrugs]
Re:[shrugs] (Score:4, Informative)
Y'all forgot the episode from the last season of the Slashdot Show. If you had caught up with that one, it was all about how this case was supposed to test key legal waters about this area of music copyright law which is the other 80% of the story that Submitter missed. The point was all about what qualifies as your property when it is space-shifted to the cloud vs the liability of the services.
Commentators that time remarked about how "companies as big as Google and Amazon and Apple aren't exactly stupid, so if they all open variants of these music locker services, their chief of legal must have decided that it's better than even chances to call a showdown vs the RIAA. Some other day we can all have lunch and argue about what precise finesses pass muster but that's why you guys should have heard of them.
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There's a Slashdot show?
Yup ... right between the posts by the anti <inert name of large tech company here> shills and the Gamemaker posts.
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I don't watch /. Show so I can't forget the episode. :P
Re:Never heard of it (Score:5, Informative)
The only bit which rang a bell FTFA:
Based in San Diego, California, MP3tunes was launched in 2005 by Robertson three years after stepping down as CEO of MP3.com, which was also founded by him.
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Dang. Mp3.com was one of the greatest things ever. And as far as I know a LOT of legitimate artists used it back then in the same manner than myspace became at its peak.
Not a lot of assets (Score:4, Informative)
MP3tunes had filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 7 code, which envisages liquidation of a company's operation. In the court filing, the company had listed out assets of about $7,800 and liabilities of $2.1 million.
Good luck with that...
Now I understand (Score:5, Insightful)
EMI probably knew that this was the probable outcome --- which explains why they repeatedly tried to add Michael Robertson as a personal defendent. Looks to me that Big Media has had it in for him ever since he proved, with the original mp3.com website, that good music could be generated and distributed without them.
I hope he and his family manage to come out financially unscathed. The original mp3.com site rocked.
Re:Now I understand (Score:5, Interesting)
Aww - those were the days! Mp3.com actually PAID indie artists to have their stuff on the site. Sent me cheques all the way to Sweden. The fees for cashing them in were greater than their value though... But at least we were PAID. Mr Robertson is for real and I wish him good luck in his future endeavors.
(I eventually brought our expired cheques with me on a trip to California, and the staff at mp3.com HQ happily exchanged them for a fresh one that I was able to cash in.)
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Kind of curious, would you be willing to post a link to some of your music?
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Kind of curious, would you be willing to post a link to some of your music?
Sorry about the late reply - not used to getting any feedback or even mod points in here... :/
The band's name was Tumbleweed Trail and it existed during the latter part of the nineties. I put up a couple of our tunes for posterity in a playlist on Soundcloud, you're very welcome to have a listen!
http://soundcloud.com/strummindude/sets/tumbleweed-trails/ [soundcloud.com]
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Thanks for the link, I promise to "taste" your music! Might take a bit, my laptop's audio is currently broken (Oneiric) and my family doesn't leave me that much free time on the other public family computer.
Liked "Still Got Thunder" --- catchy lyric that, "still got thunder rumblin' in my soul". (It's just not fair, the asymmetry between how easy it is for Swedes to speak English versus the other way around --- I can't even count to 10 in Swedish!).
Re:Now I understand (Score:5, Interesting)
The original mp3.com site rocked.
Indeed it did. In fact, the last time I purchased new CDs was from some bands on mp3.com. Since then its been all used discs or piracy.
However, not all was so great with mp3.com. I ran one of those tools that analyze WAV files for signs of WAV->MP3->WAV conversions and it turns out that all of the CDs I bought from mp3.com were "upconverts" from 128Kbps mp3. And that was long before LAME got awesome - it may even have not existed back then, so I'm now stuck with crummy 128Kbps encodes. But that's better than not having any of that music at all.
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EMI probably knew that this was the probable outcome
Did they also know the outcome that a significant percentage of the sites customers will flock to tpb and other pirate sites? Yeah they probably did. More people to sue.
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Adding Michael to the suit as a personal defendent would open up way too many doors as the whole point of a corporation is to limit personal liability in case of suit. EMI doesn't want to be in
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My understanding is that they didn't claim that he would be liable for the corporation's losses --- instead, they accused him personally of copyright infringement based on music in his personal mp3tunes locker. On the other hand, I had the impression that the defence ripped apart the claims of EMI that anyone who downloaded any EMI music whatsoever from the net had to know it was unlicensed --- they exhibited a fairly long list of songs that EMI had put up on the net, itself, for free downloading.
Unfortunat
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Not just big media, but it also looks like some his former employees have it [freespire.com] for him as well.
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Thanks for the interesting link, I had suspected that anyone who would be capable of attempting all of the things he's attempted would probably have to have a commensurate ego. Similar to Steve Jobs in some ways, if the general opinion out on the net is correct.
The linked site does reek of "disgruntled employee / friend / SO", as opposed to "we want to give you a balanced picture of what Michael Robertson is like"; so frankly, I doubt I'll ever know exactly what's going on. Actually, even if I would meet Mr
Re:Not a lot of assets (Score:4, Insightful)
They should just sell some of the trillions of dollars worth of song files they're holding on to. According to statutory damages, each song is worth about $150K; they could erase their entire debt by selling just 14 tracks.
Not so bad, he's the only secured creditor (Score:2)
Through his trust
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Robertson_(businessman)#MP3tunes [wikipedia.org]
http://kevincarmony.com/freespire/MP3tunesBK.pdf [kevincarmony.com]
I can only imagine if this happened 100 years ago (Score:2)
MP3 Tunes Wasn't Even the First Locker Service (Score:3)
Myplay.com back in 1999 was offering a digital music locker online.
http://web.archive.org/web/20000510123618/http://www.myplay.com/ [archive.org]
my.mp3.com borrowed large parts of the myplay design but instead of uploading they used their CD verification system which was judged to be illegal, then.... later mr Robertson copied myplay's entire feature set for mp3tunes.
iPhone and apple desktop apps were garbage (Score:2)
On a related note, I wish the Amazon cloud drive had an iPhone app.