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Legal
US judge lets EMI sue Robertson direct over MP3tunes.com
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 20 October 2009
A US judge last week gave EMI the OK to sue digital music veteran Michael Robertson over his MP3tunes.com service.
As previously reported, EMI has been pursuing litigation against MP3tunes.com since November 2007, arguing that the online storage system, which lets users store their MP3 collections on an external server which they can then access on any computer, infringes the music company’s copyrights.
EMI’s original lawsuit named MP3tunes.com and its founder Michael Robertson as defendants, but last year a judge ruled that the entrepreneur himself could not be targeted through the litigation. However, that ruling has now been changed. The court changed its mind because of a new deposition given by Emily Richards, the former President of MP3tunes.com.
She told the court that Robertson had a very hands-on involvement in the day to day development and running of MP3tunes.com, and often made decisions without consulting her. This, EMI successfully argued, backed up their viewpoint that Robertson should accept some personal liability for any infringement his new service may or may not be guilty of.
Because Richards’ deposition differed, the judge concluded, from one she had previously given while still working for Robertson, and because the original decision regarding Robertson’s liability had in part been based on that original deposition, he was happy to reverse the 2008 court ruling and restate Robertson as a defendant. If you follow.
Robertson, a long term adversary of the major labels ever since founding the original MP3.com in 1997, was unsurprisingly critical of the court’s ruling and EMI’s continued litigation.
He says that Richards’ new deposition wasn’t hugely different to her first statement, that the fact EMI paid his former employee ten grand to give a new statement throws doubt on her new deposition (the major hasn’t commented on that allegation, though it seems they did cover Richard’s legal fees and costs), and that EMI is targeting him in a bid to frighten any other entrepreneurs considering involvement in a new digital service where there may be an unclear copyright position
C-Net quote Robertson thus: “We want to argue the merits of the case. They want to drag it out … people should be able to store their music online”.
The case is due to go to court in March.
