AfterDawn: News

In today's closing arguments, Universal Music Group (part of Seagram), asked judge to award it up to $450 million in damages in its case against MP3.com.

Tomorrow U.S. District judge Rikoff will decide did or didn't MP3.com violate Universal's copyrights "willfully" -- meaning did they understand that they're breaking the law when they created their massive audio archive to back up their My.MP3.com service.



Universal accuses that MP3.com has 10,000 recordings in its database that violate UMG's copyrights. They ask judge to punish MP3.com by $45,000 per each CD.

MP3.com asked judge to rule that they didn't break copyrights "willfully" and therefor lower the damages to $500 per CD. MP3.com also claims that only 4,700 of its CDs are copyrighted material of UMG. This would lower the number to $2.4 million.

All other RIAA main members have already settled their lawsuits against MP3.com -- MP3.com has spent $150M to legal expenses or at least that's the amount what they informed to shareholders they would use from their "warchest".

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 5 Sep 2000 17:38