The Universal Music Group is at it again as they have now sued News Corp.'s (NWS-A) MySpace, saying that the site has empowered its users to post millions of Universal's songs and videos to the online community.
One report says that MySpace encourages the "copyright infringement by taking proactive measures such as reformatting music to better suit Web browsers and offering means to share the material with others."
The suit is asking for $150,000 for each song or video that is posted on the site. The music company alleges that they have identified 60 specific copyright violations.
While the social networking sites believe they are protected from legal responsibility via the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this is an obvious 
lawsuit to test that assertion. Since the law was created for the very purpose of protecting ISPs from being accountable for copyright material their users might share, it seems to be that it will be hard to keep that law within that limitation alone.
Universal Music has nothing to lose with doing this, as you never know what will happen when you go to court. This happens after the companies have been trying to reach agreement for quite some time on these issues.
Another problem Universal may have is that their suit comes at a time when MySpace just implemented audio fingerprinting technology to combat the problem.
To me this is Universal just trying to get a bigger piece of the action than MySpace was willing to allow. One good thing about this is that once the outcome is reached, it will leave no uncertainty as to what the direction of the industry will take.
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