The court ruled that MP3.com’s service was illegal because they were streaming THEIR files to you, not yours. They would have ruled in favor of a service where you uploaded YOUR rip, and they stored it and streamed to you. (Of course, the costs of doing that would have been prohibitive; storage was still expensive back then. I remember buying my first 1 GB hard drive in that era; it cost as much (in actual dollars, not adjusted for inflation) as a 16 TB drive does now.) They simply couldn’t wrap their heads around the notion that they were the SAME file. The fact that they were made from different copies of the CD was irrelevant; the bits were the same, and therefore the company only needed one copy.