Petteri Pyyny
8 May 2001 16:07
Recording industry's cash-cow number two (right after consumers), MP3.com, is in trouble once again. Bunch of artists including Tom Waits, Randy Newman and Heart have sued MP3.com for violating their copyrights in My.MP3.com service. As usual, they're seeking for a maximum penalty of $150,000 per each track distributed over the service.
MP3.com has already lost similiar cases against Universal Music Group and TVT Records, so the case is almost clear even before it has really begun. MP3.com also settled similiar cases with other four major record labels and has spent millions of dollars because of their My.MP3.com service.
Funniest thing in this whole issue is the method how My.MP3.com used to work -- users could listen audio tracks online from albums they have already purchased. Problem was that MP3.com had created a music database so users don't have to encode each and every song they own and send those tracks to MP3.com's servers, but instead use shortcut by using MP3.com's copies of tracks and just authenticate that they have actually the CD -- and creating a music database violated copyrights...