MP3Tunes.com in November, 2005
In March we covered the first ruling in a years-long court case against Michael Robertson, founder of MP3Tunes.com. The verdict went badly for Robertson, who faced a bill for $48-million in damages and punitive compensation. Now the presiding judge has reduced the punitive component of the verdict to one-tenth of its original size — from $7.5-million to $750,000.
MPTunes.com started in 2005 as a music download store, an indie alternative to iTunes. It evolved into a more complex service that allowed users to store music in the cloud (it wasn’t commonly called the cloud yet), after undergoing verification that they owned a CD. A spinoff site called Sideload allowed uploading of music encountered on the web at large, and that feature motivated the legal actions. EMI Group, then a major label, sued MP3Tunes.com in 2007, and decisions are just rolling in this year.
Having achieved this knock-down of the punitive verdict, an attorney for Robertson said he expects further reductions, perhaps carving out about 75% of the $40-million remaining bill for damages.
The initial verdict stunned many observers of the music copyright wars, all the more because it foretold a type of service (cloud access to music) which has become commonplace. MP3Tunes and Sideload lacked comprehensive music licensing which might have satisfied the labels, but Robertson was clearly ahead of his time conceptually. In 2005, nearly 10 years ago, he said: “As storage continues to come down in price it will be practical to have storage in many different devices including phones, PDAs, home stereos, car stereos, sunglasses, bike helmets – you name it! And of course people will want their music in all those locations.”
Robertson is an innovator and I’m glad the tide has turned in his direction. Go Michael go!