The verdict is in. On March 20th, a federal jury in Manhattan found the former MP3tunes founder and CEO, Michael Robertson, and MP3tunes, a now non-existent digital music storage locker, liable for copyright infringement. The court awarded damages to EMI (a British multinational music recording and publishing company), that could very well amount to over $60 million when the final decision on damages is reached. There were 2,100 copyright infringements listed in this case.

In the report by Reuters, the jury found the company liable on various claims that they infringed on copyrights associated with several artists including The Beatles, Coldplay and David Bowie. The jurors also found that MP3tunes was willfully blind to copyright infringement on its website, which was, as a lawyer for the recording companies suggested before the verdict, the first ruling by a jury of its kind. While the jury largely sided with the EMI recording and publishing companies, they sided with Robertson on some claims, including by deciding not to hold him liable for MP3tunes' failure to remove files from users' online "lockers" the website provided users to store music.

EMI brought the copyright case against MP3tunes in 2007, which happened to be the same year that Viacom sued YouTube. This case, Capitol Records vs. MP3tunes, was considered to be a very involved and complex case due to the various aspects involved, and also largely in part that it was the first of its kind case for a digital music storage locker. This case has been followed very closely by the entertainment industry and copyright advocates.

In 2005, Michael Robertson founded MP3tunes, which operated two websites. The first one was mp3tunes.com, which offered personal online storage lockers for music. Users could upload music to their lockers from their computer hard drives, or from third party websites by providing a URL. The second website, sideload.com, was a search engine that would find links to free music files on the internet. Sideload.com used an index of websites known to host free music files, and the index grew from the third party websites that mp3tunes.com users copied music from. MP3tunes filed for bankruptcy in 2012, due in large part to this lawsuit.

Robertson has a long standing history fighting legal issues regarding MP3tunes, and the final decision on damages being held in a separate trial is expected to take two to three days.

This is a huge win for the music industry, and it's the type of win Viacom was hoping for in its battle with YouTube which was recently settled out of court after seven years.