After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a malpractice lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised it that they had a good faith claim that the service they wanted to offer would be considered legal under copyright law... The clear purpose of this lawsuit...was to send an unequivocal message to lawyers advising clients in this space: It is not just your clients who might suffer if the content industry directs its guns against them. It is also you... This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April 2003, Universal and EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm (VC) that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development... The claim here, as well, was that the VC should have recognized the right of the content industry to control how the industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for funding a company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, the aim of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk not just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well.Great Monkey Jesus. They really won't stop at anything, will they. It should be said that MP3.com was not infringing in any reasonable sense. It wasn't Napster or Kazaa. It was trying to provide a service to paying customers - people who had already paid for their music, by the way. And this is what happened.
Free Culture should be on all your reading lists. You can download it here (in pdf or torrent.)
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