Pryor Cashman obtained a multimillion dollar jury verdict for its client, EMI Music Publishing (now administered by another Pryor Cashman client, Sony/ATV Music Publishing) for willful copyright infringement against defendants MP3tunes LLC and its CEO and owner Michael Robertson. The case was pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and was presided over by Judge William H. Pauley III.

Plaintiffs filed suit against Robertson and MP3tunes in late 2007, claiming that Robertson’s Sideload.com and MP3tunes.com websites, and his "Sideload Plug-in" software tool, enabled users to identify copyrighted music files anywhere on the Internet, and then "sideload" those files into "storage lockers" on MP3tunes’ servers, at which point they would be added to a searchable index of files on Sideload.com, where any other user could search for, download or stream those files.

Plaintiffs claimed that Robertson was directly liable for his own acts of sideloading files to his websites, and was vicariously liable for sideloads by MP3tunes employees. Plaintiffs further contended that Robertson and MP3tunes were secondarily liable for the sideloads made by their users, and that the defendants were not entitled to benefit from the "safe harbors" of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because, under the standard announced by the Second Circuit in Viacom v. YouTube, they had willfully blinded themselves to, and had "red flag knowledge" of, specific infringing activity on the sites.

The jury rendered two separate verdicts. In the first verdict, after a trial on the issue of liability, the jury found that Robertson and MP3tunes were liable for virtually all of the infringements alleged.

In the second verdict, after a trial on damages, the jury found that the acts of Robertson and MP3tunes were willful, and awarded $25,000-30,000 per work infringed on the secondary liability claims. The jury also assessed over $500,000 for Robertson’s direct infringements of EMI Music Publishing’s compositions.

The nearly 500 EMI Music Publishing works that Robertson and MP3tunes were found to have willfully infringed included such classic songs as Always On My Mind, Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, Buffalo Soldier, Come Away With Me, Everlasting Love, I Heard it Through the Grapevine, I Second That Emotion, Jump, Just My Imagination, La Bamba, My Girl, Stand By Your Man, Try A Little Tenderness, On The Road Again, Oye Como Va, We Gotta Get Out Of This Place, U Can’t Touch This and Wild Thing. Pryor Cashman believes that this is the first large-scale digital copyright infringement case to have been tried to a jury.

Plaintiffs were represented by Partner Frank Scibilia, Co-Chair of Pryor Cashman’s Digital Media Practice Group, Counsel Mona Simonian, and Associates Ross Bagley and Leighton Dellinger, all members of Pryor Cashman's Litigation, Intellectual Property and Media & Entertainment Groups..