Like frustrated prosecutors charging an acquitted crime boss with tax evasion, the major record labels are suing the creators of the Morpheus file-sharing network again -- not over the software that millions of people use to copy billons of songs for free but over a service that never launched.
The claims come about a month after the labels, music publishers and Hollywood studios suffered a stunning setback in their first copyright infringement lawsuit against Morpheus' creator, Streamcast Networks Inc. U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson ruled that Streamcast and Grokster, the distributor of another popular file-sharing program, weren't responsible for the piracy committed by their programs' users.
Wilson is in Los Angeles. The labels took the new case to a federal court in Nashville, where Streamcast and its precursor companies were based when they developed the service in dispute.
"The legal term for this is 'forum shopping,' " said attorney Mark Radcliffe, a copyright-law expert at Gray Cary Ware & Freidenrich in Palo Alto. "You get a bad decision someplace, you go someplace else.... They're filing in a place where music is important, where they've got a good chance of getting a sympathetic decision."
The Recording Industry Assn. of America issued a brief statement in response to questions about the lawsuit, saying only that "this is another step in our ongoing litigation against Streamcast, a company that we believe is responsible for widespread copyright infringement."
Streamcast executives said they were outraged. They said the company tried to develop an online radio service three years ago, abandoning the effort when it couldn't get licenses from the labels. Now, they complained, they're being sued for legitimate steps they took to prepare for the would-be venture.
The record labels are "sore losers," said Michael Weiss, chief executive of Streamcast. "It looks like they're coming after us for exploring another legal business model, one that we didn't even launch."
At issue is a computerized collection of music that Streamcast -- previously known as MusicCity.com Inc. and Infinite Music Inc. -- compiled in 1999 and 2000.
The lawsuit alleges that Streamcast acquired CDs with thousands of songs, then converted them into a digital database on hard drives and other storage devices. The company made multiple copies of the songs and the database, all without the permission of the copyright owners, the lawsuit alleges.
