“Two software developers who have attracted lawsuits from media organisations are behind an online music service launching on Wednesday that seems certain to be scrutinised for copyright violations,” Chris Nuttall reports for The Financial Times. “Michael Robertson, once the founder of MP3.com, a music site sued for copyright infringements, will launch a ‘digital locker’ on his MP3tunes.com website where users can store their record collections online.”
“MP3tunes.com will charge $39.95 a year for users to upload songs to a personal locker and access them through a web browser from any computer with an internet connection,” Nuttall reports. “Mr Robertson says he is offering storage in the same way Google offers e-mail storage with Gmail, but concedes record companies may suspect users will share password keys to their lockers and enable illegal music-sharing online… Mr Robertson said users would typically be able to upload 200-300 songs an hour.”
Full article here.
Advertisements:
The New iMac G5 – Built-in camera and remote control. From $1299. Free shipping.
Apple USB Modem. Easily connect to the Internet using your dial-up service. $49.00.
Technically, something like this can already be achieved for free. “gDisk” is free software that turns your free Google GMail account into a portable hard drive so you can always have your important files accessible accross the Internet. It’s not 200-300 uploaded songs per hour, it’s more like 50-60 songs an hour (typical cable modem, 192kbps AAC, 5MB per song average), but it’s free. More info here.
It’s ridiculous to penalize the developers for something the labels “suspect” might happen…I think it sounds legit…too bad its only mp3 and not aac.
Andrew Hamilton
Hamilton International Productions
http://www.hiproductions.com
Record labels and the RIA will be on their a$$es faster than you
can say RIP and Burn
Theres a similar utility for Windows that will map a Gmail account’s storage as a network drive in Windows Explorer, with full drag/drop abilities. It’s called the Gmail Drive Shell Extention.
This sounds like it could easily be a digital backup service. Offsite backup of your music (although limited to MP3s) for a reasonable annual rate sounds great to me. Especially if you can store gigabytes of data. I’d need something like 100GB of storage, but would be willing to pay a premium price, say $50-$100 per year to have a full backup located somewhere other than my house.
hiproductionsdotcom agree, it’s like suing car companies for making cars that go faster than the lowest speedlimit. silly american companies!
What’s to stop terrorists from cloaking sensitive files (maps, diagrams, schedules, a database of critical infrastructure and their weak points, bomb-making recipes, prayers…) in an mp3 wrapper and passing the code to members of their cell? Or pedophiles for that matter? Is Home Security in an uproar because of this? No. Only “media organizations” are worried.
I have nothing useful to contribute, other than the uncanniness that is my magic word… freedom.
U know
this could end up as a subscripition model
think about it
U buy from itunes and then pay a subscription fee to redownload the song that u lost
BUT….