Tort Michael Robertson, CEO of MP3.com

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Business Tort Michael Robertson is the CEO of MP3.com. Over the past few years, he has established a flourishing business, which had a market value of around $1.8 Billion. In February 2002, a case was filed against mp3.com by a nonprofit trade organization that represents the recording industry, namely the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Robertson claimed that RIAA was presenting a false picture to his stockholders and lying to his partners. RIAA sued him for copyright violation. Robertson sued them back on charges of defamation, trade libel, intrusion with potential economic benefit, and undue business practices. If the situation is analyzed, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) suit against MP3.com actually points out the fact that Mp3.com had illegally copied around 45,000 CDs. Through this, MP3.com could offer an instant "Beam-it" feature that would upload the contents of the CDs from your personal library to MP3.com's Website. Beam-it software is a revolutionary program that lets MP3.com instantly identify the CDs you own so they can add them to your My.MP3.com account. With Beam-it, a visitor never has to upload song files or convert their CDs to MP3s. There's no ripping or encoding involved. While it takes hours to upload an album to other sites, Beam-it allows one to start listening to music from their My.MP3 account in less than a minute. Hence, users can store their music online and listen to it from anywhere. Record companies all over the world carried out a large- scale revolt. There were press releases against this venture. Artists and singers favored the record companies whose profits started to fall. Everyone thought MP3.com was becoming a giant in the music world, just like Micr...

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...utive director, Hilary Rosen, for planning an influential financial lawsuit against MP3.com to demolish their stock value. MP3.com’s lawsuit proclaimed that that the RIAA has been committing defamation activities by sending letters to artist management companies and showing them an incorrect picture. The RIAA obviously denied the allegations. Rosen stated that RIAA has a clear-cut record of following and enforcing legal uses of the MP3 technology. This leads the thinker astray, should Beam-it be legalized? David Pakman, founder of Myplay, stated that a license should be enforced with it to legalize it. References Jodi Mardesich. Valley Talk: MP3.com Vs The RIAA. Fortune, February 10, 2000. Retrieved from the website http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,372735,00.html on June 7, 2003. MP3.com. Retrieved from the website http://www.mp3.com on June 7, 2003.

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