Digital Music Pioneer Is Found Liable in Copyright Suit

Michael Robertson, a pioneer in the digital music business who has repeatedly clashed with record companies over legal issues, was found liable for $41 million in a long-running federal copyright infringement suit. His latest conflict with the music industry was over MP3tunes, a company he founded in 2005 and shut down two years ago. MP3tunes let its users back up digital music files on remote services on the Internet -- an early version of the so-called cloud lockers that technology giants like Apple and Google offer as part of their standard suite of digital music offerings.

In 2007, the music company EMI sued for copyright infringement, saying that MP3tunes and a related site, Sideload.com, hosted EMI's songs without the proper licenses. Over the last seven years the case has become one of the most complex in digital music; in some ways it served as a musical parallel to Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube, which was also filed in 2007 and settled last week. Three years ago, the judge in the MP3tunes case, William H. Pauley III of United States District Court in Manhattan, ruled that MP3tunes’s business was legal, but that Robertson and other executives could still be held personally liable for some songs hosted without permission.