Jari Ketola
21 Aug 2001 15:40
It's the same old story re-visited. Fifty-two independent artists represented by Copyright.net have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against MP3.com. As before, the lawsuit accuses MP3.com of distributing copyrighted music through their My.MP3.com service which was shut down ages ago. The lawsuit identifies about 1,000 songs, and the plaintiffs are seeking damages of $25,000 per infringed song.
According to the lawsuit streaming songs from the My.MP3.com service were easy to record on hard-disk and then share the songs on P2P services like Napster. But in order to stream the songs from the services the user had to own the actual CD. The last time I checked, it is actually much easier to use a CDDA extractor to convert a CD to MP3 format instead of going through the laborious process of recording "live" streams off the Net.
The motive behind the lawsuit is most likely the fact that having been acquired by Vivendi Universal, MP3.com is more capable, and perhaps also more likely to pay damages to whoever seeks them.