Submitted by: arnesr
RIAA Wins Suit Against MP3.com
Months of legal wrangling came to a head Friday when a federal judge in New York issued a terse order holding MP3.com "liable for copyright infringement," giving the recording industry an early win in its battle to close the music-download website. U.S. District Judge Jed S. Rakoff said in the one-page order that he would explain his verdict in two weeks. The judge and attorneys for each side will meet at 5 p.m. EDT Friday to discuss how the ruling will affect the daily operation of MP3.com, said a consultant for the Recording Industry Association of America.
The RIAA also is expected to file an injunction to have the
albums from the major labels removed from the service.
The lawsuit brought by the RIAA and filed in the Southern
District of New York claims that MP3.com created an illegal
database of 45,000 CDs, which the company purchased
and uploaded on to MP3.com's servers. The suit sought to
shut down the service.
Users who sign up for the service and who call
my.mp3.com are then able to stream music from that
database to any device that can access the Internet.
"We think this is a loss for the labels," Robertson said
during a conference call Friday. "When a responsible
system like my.mp3.com, which requires people to buy the
CDs before they can listen to the music is potentially halted, that leaves a vacuum for other services like
Napster and Gnutella -- which don't protect artists -- to
flourish."
