EMI Christian Music Group, Inc. v. MP3tunes, L.L.C.

MP3tunes, L.L.C. (MP3tunes) (defendant) operated Sideload.com, which enabled users to search for free music on the internet, and a locker service that charged users a fee to store music on MP3tunes’ server. Using Sideload.com, users could obtain a free plug-in that enabled them to download (or sideload, using MP3tunes’ terminology) free songs from the internet directly to their lockers. Sideload.com maintained a searchable index of songs that users had sideloaded into their lockers, which were then made available to other users. Thus, as users sideloaded more songs from the Internet, more free music became available for Sideload.com users to share. MP3tunes received numerous takedown notices from copyright holders alleging that songs in the Sideload.com index had been sideloaded in violation of the owners’ copyrights, but MP3tunes did not take steps to track users who added infringing content. In fact, MP3tunes executives were encouraged to and did sideload songs from sites that contained obviously infringing material and made the songs available to users. EMI Christian Music Group, Inc., along with other record companies and music publishers (collectively, EMI) (plaintiffs) sued MP3tunes and alleged infringement of EMI’s copyrights in thousands of sound recordings. The district court granted partial summary judgment to MP3tunes under a safe-harbor provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that protected an Internet service provider from liability for the acts of its users if, among other things, the provider adopted and reasonably implemented a policy for terminating subscribers who were repeat infringers. EMI appealed, arguing that MP3tunes did not implement a repeat-infringer policy, as evidenced by the fact that MP3tunes did not track users who repeatedly added infringing content to the Sideload.com index.