Petteri Pyyny
10 Oct 2002 2:38
MP3.com, one of the services that launched the digital music revolution in 1990s, is back in the headlines, once again. And the reason is the same as always -- company has been sued over copyright infringements.
Lawsuit was filed at Manhattan federal court by three artists, Billy Joel, Bob Dylan and James Taylor, who all work under Sony's record labels. The suit goes back in time to 1999 and early 2000, when MP3.com operated a controversial My.MP3.com service that allowed users to store their CDs to MP3.com's servers. The major problem came when MP3.com didn't require users to actually upload the albums to their servers, but instead just verified that users actually owned the CD and then MP3.com simply copied the files to users' personal "folders" from MP3.com's fileservers. This, however legal it sounds, raised a major lawsuit from major record labels and eventually ended up costing $175M to the company which was later on bought by one of the major record labels, French Vivendi Universal.
Details of the new lawsuit are still blurry and it is not clear on what basis artists are now sueing MP3.com's practices back in My.MP3.com era, since one would think that they were already represented in the original lawsuit, filed by Sony, their record label. But this is the case anyway, so we'll see what happens. As usual, all artists are claiming damages upto $150,000 per song that MP3.com used in the My.MP3.com service.
Source: NetImperative