The man behind the original MP3.com, one of the early flagships of online music of course, has been sued by the EMI Group over allegations two of his newer online ventures - http://www.sideload.com and http://www.mp3tunes.com - infringe their copyrights.
Robertson is no stranger to record label litigation of course. While MP3.com was predominantly a service built around unsigned and independent artists, their My.MP3.com service, which enabled users to upload and manage their CD collections, pissed off the then embarrassingly paranoid majors leading to litigation, a court defeat for Robertson, and a $200 million settlement from which MP3.com, then faced with the challenge of weathering the dot.com collapse, never really recovered. Vivendi Universal, ironically the parent company of one of the majors who had sued Robertson, then bought MP3.com, though they then also went through financial collapse and the service was eventually sold to current owners C-Net, who relaunched it as a more generic music website.
But none of that is really relevant here, accept that EMI's lawsuit notes that after Robertson sold MP3.com he "ultimately started this one [MP3tunes] as a vehicle to achieve a comparable infringing purpose". It continues: "MP3tunes, however, does not own the music it exploits; nor does MP3tunes have any legal right or authority to use or exploit that music".
Robertson, a longtime critic of the major record companies' litigious approach to digital music, says he has not yet seen EMI's legal papers, but has told Billboard he suspects that the litigation is "retaliatory" because MP3tunes sued EMI back in September over a take-down notice the major had issued against its Sideload service, which is basically a guide to legal free music on the net.
EMI's action is not related to Robertson's other newish venture, AnywhereCD, which, as previously reported, was essentially a DRM-free MP3 download platform which boasted at launch that it had DRM-free music from DRM-obsessed Warner Music - the twist was that in theory the site sold you mail order CDs, but then let you download MP3s of tracks off the CDs you bought on the basis you could rip them anyway once you got the physical CD. The service quickly became controversial when Warner announced they had been misled about the nature of AnywhereCD and they ordered their music be removed. Another legal spat followed, though Robertson and the major subsequently settled out of court. It should be noted AnywhereCD is seemingly now offline, possibly because without Warner's involvement, and with other download platforms now offering MP3 downloads from EMI and Universal signed artists, the new venture wasn't viable.