AfterDawn: News

MP3.com has spent this week in court with Seagram's Universal Music Group -- the court has to decide whether or not the MP3.com's executives understood that their My.MP3.com service is illegal and violates record companies copyrights.

So far the hearings have caused some major trouble for MP3.com's defence arguments. Today judge rejected MP3.com's claims that Universal wants to put MP3.com out of business because Universal has similiar business plans as MP3.com and it wants to kill the competition. Judge rejected the argument because it doesn't actually have anything to do with the hearings -- the sole and only purpose of these court dates going on currently, is to define did the MP3.com's understand that their service is illegal.



Yesterday Michael Robertson was under very heavy fire from UMG when he claimed that he thought that their service is legal before they launched it -- he didn't have any legal professional's opinion to back this decision back then. Judge also said that it seems to be ridicilous to claim that someone who is in this business, doesn't ask for legal opinion before his company launches something completely new.

The issue why MP3.com was found guilty in April is not because of their My.MP3.com service itself, but the fact that company "pre-loaded" their music library and purchased CDs worth of $1M and used those CDs in digital format to provide the service for customers instead of actually copying every time the data from the CD that customer sends to them for sale.

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 30 Aug 2000 19:55