MP3.com's legal troubles are far from being over - now company may face yet another legal action from four major record labels it already settled with earlier this fall.
Reason for this is the award Universal received from MP3.com - it's twice as much as other labels received from the company. So, now other labels are told to be pushing a legal actions against MP3.com to force it to raise the settlement prices.
U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff on Tuesday awarded $50 million in statutory damages and $3.4 million in legal fees to Universal in lawsuit involving MP3.com's My.MP3.com music service.
Universal made a statement after the case was closed that it will award approximately half of the sum directly to their artists.
UMG and MP3.com also agreed to licence that Universal will licence their music catalog to My.MP3.com service. Universal also will have a possibility to buy 5 percent of MP3.com's stocks.
Tomorrow MP3.com and UMG go back to court to start a process to determine the damages MP3.com should pay for UMG for copyright infrigiment.
In September Judge Jed Rakoff ruled that MP3.com's service My.MP3.com and the music archive company had built to support the service, violated UMG's copyrights.
Legal process was originally between RIAA and MP3.com, but MP3.com settled with other four major record labels in the summer. Only UMG continued the process.
MP3.com can face penalties up to $225 million, depending on the fact what court decides on the major issue -- how many of the CDs stored in MP3.com's archive, were actually copyrighted material of UMG.
In Friday, Bertelsmann Music Group and EMI announced that they're in talks of possible merger. This comes after EMI has called off its postponed merger with giant AOL-TimeWarner after the plan faced possible antitrust issues from European Union.
"BMG and EMI would be an odd combination," said Joe Smith, a former record executive who has worked with both EMI and Warner. "They're mirror images of each other. They both have strong international divisions and their own distribution. It's hard to see how they complement one another, other than to just make BMG bigger."
Both companies are members of so-called "big five" team, a bunch of record companies who basically share world's music markets and are the leading power behind organizations such as RIAA.
CMGI, major internet venture player, who owns AltaVista, etc. is rumoured to pull their investment off from the iCast, a webcasting company that CMGI owns a major stake.
"I've heard that iCast was going to be sold by CMGI or closed," one industry source said.
Many entertainment based web companies have suffered in past couple of months, even more than the average Internet industry which has also taken huge hits since last spring when Nasdaq index started to fall, specially on Net stocks.
For regular Joe Customer, the loss of iCast doesn't mean that much, but somehow it also does. I mean, iCast is one of the major sponsor's of OGG Vorbis project - a project that's been developing totally free alternative for MP3s with better quality and smaller filesizes.
SDMI has finished analyzing the hacking competition results. They claim that three out of total six technologies were protected against attacks and one of the remaining three technologies was pulled out of the contest before its end.
So, this leaves two technologies that have been successfully hacked. And SDMI claims that even the other of these two that were successfully cracked - the technology used to crack this other protection scheme, didn't work on any other music files than for the sample file provided for the competition.
Listen.com has agreed to buy assets of Scour Inc. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Deal would give Listen.com control to Scour's assets, but doesn't held Listen.com responsible of Scour's legal issues which were the main reason why company laid their staff off and filed a bankruptcy in October.
This is any ways doesn't mean that Listen.com has actually acquired Scour - deal is not on that level, yet(?).
But interesting to see, Listen.com would probably lead Scour Exchange to legal purposes -- Napster is going to the same direction with its deal with BMG. Two legal rivals? Maybe..
MP3.com has appointed former California Court of Appeals judge to their board of directors. Justice Howard Wiener, who has retired from his justicy duties, joins to MP3.com's board just in the middle of MP3.com's long fight against Universal Music Group over MP3.com's My.MP3.com service.
