Home > Journals > St. John's Law Review > Vol. 87 > No. 2
Document Type
Note
Abstract
(Excerpt)
Part I of this Note discusses the shift in musical formats from physical, tangible items to digital, intangible files and provides an overview of the different digital locker storage services presently available to consumers. It then addresses data deduplication technology, and explains why it should not affect the public performance analysis. Part II examines the relevant copyright law statutory provisions, case law construing the public performance right, and the unique copy analysis. Part III briefly reviews the unique copy analysis as applied in a recent case involving a digital music locker provider. Part III also argues that courts should apply a two-pronged analysis in the future to better assess whether a work accessed from a digital locker has been publicly performed. Finally, this Note concludes that the public performance analysis should center around who may access a digital locker, not whether each user’s digital locker contains a unique copy of each musical work.