Michael Robertson: EMI You Lie

Our battle with EMI over personal music lockers is nearly marking its two year anniversary and slowly moving forward. While EMI drags the case out, they're working hard to disparage MP3tunes and portray us as massive copyright infringers (a tactic they use against all companies they sue). To prove their case they're claiming that all tracks online are infringements and therefore anyone that links to them or allows storage for them is a knowing infringer. Anyone with a working knowledge of online music knows EMI and the other music companies makes available thousands of tracks online for promotion, but we need help to collect this information and provide it to the court.

EMI is likely spending 10 times what we are on their legal attack as evidenced by the 8 attorneys that showed up in a recent hearing to argue EMI's position. They desperately want to block personal online music storage. Our strategy is use our community and the facts which are on our side to compete with their massive legal budget. One of our engineers has created a bookmarklet - which you can add to your browser in seconds (no restart required) that will allow you to help. Then as you browse you can quickly identify any promotional tracks from EMI artists and quickly send us a note about its location. Our intention is to assemble a list of EMI tracks and present them to the court as evidence that they do online promotion not only in our case but in the many other cases EMI has brought against digital music companies.

I hope you'll take a few seconds to add this link to your browser and help us win our case by visiting your favorite digital music web site. You'll be helping MP3tunes secure the right to online storage and be helping other outspent companies in their digital music battle.

We've made it easy for you with a simple tool that just takes seconds to add to your web browser. Thanks in advance for your help!

1) Drag this link to your toolbar: You Lie EMI

2) Browse your favorite music sites. If you come across links to promotional tracks that are freely downloadable: highlight the name of the artist and click the "You Lie EMI" bookmarklet in your toolbar. This will run a check to see if the artist is an EMI band. If they are not related to EMI then you will see a red "X" appear next to their name.

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3) If the artist IS related to EMI then you will see a green check mark appear next to their name. These are the links that we are looking for! EMI has told the court that they don't distribute any free promotional tracks on the Internet.

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4) The best examples are promotional sites which have DIRECT links to .mp3 downloads for EMI related arists. (Some sites offer streaming tracks to listen to, but not download.) We want direct URLs where you can download promotional tracks. Just right-click on the link and choose "Copy Link Location". Then, paste into the field of the bookmarklet. Fill out the rest of the info and click the "Submit" button.

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5) After you click the Submit button you'll see a "Thank You" message which lets you know that your link has been added sucessfully to the database

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