A U.S. federal court ruled on Friday that MP3.com Inc. (NASDAQ:MPPP) violated copyright law with the creation of its database in which users can store music and then access it via any computer connected to the Internet.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed by the world's largest record labels which said that the database of more than 80,000 copyrighted albums, part of the online music downloading company's
http://my.mp3.com service, represented copyright infringement.
The database is part of the San Diego, Calif.'s company's software that allows computer users who own one of these recordings to listen to the albums over the Internet from any computer.
Judge Jed Rakoff of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York issued a terse order holding MP3.com "liable for copyright infringement." The suit sought to shut down the service.
The crux of the legal issue was whether MP3.com violated copyright law with the creation of the database, even though the my.mp3.com service cannot work unless the user owns an original copy of the copyrighted work. Most of the other music that can be downloaded via MP3.com is from acts that are not under contract with a record label.