Michael Robertson (businessman)

Michael Robertson
Michael Robertson at the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference.
Born	1967 (age 49–50) United States
Residence	San Diego, California, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, San Diego
Occupation	Entrepreneur
Known for	MP3.com, Linspire, SIPphone
Website	www.michaelrobertson.com

Michael Robertson (born 1967) is the founder and former CEO of MP3.com, an Internet music site. In the years following his departure from MP3.com Robertson has launched several companies, including Linspire, SIPphone, MP3tunes, and Ajax13. He is also founder of OnRad.io, a search engine for radio and DAR.fm, a website for recording audio from internet radio.

Radio is dying because it's inconvenient and limiting. The content is not interactive, and it's available on only a limited number of devices.

Robertson was the founder of the original MP3.com. Despite the early success of MP3.com on Wall Street (the day of the stock IPO (ticker:MPPP), the stock rose from $28 to peak at $103), Robertson quickly led his company into a firestorm of lawsuits generated by the major record labels and music publishing concerns. The litigation sprang from Robertson's "Beam-it" and "Instant Listening" programs. "Beam-it" was a functionality that allowed people to quickly load their existing CD collection into online lockers at my.mp3.com and access their private music collections online. "Instant Listening" allowed instant access to CDs purchased online from participating retailers. However, to launch the service Robertson essentially had to duplicate every music CD ever created. Although MP3.com purchased the CDs for their index and users had to supply their own copy as well, MP3.com violated copyright laws by failing to acquire licenses for the music that was internally duplicated by digitally storing the material on their servers.

Virtually every major record label sued MP3.com, and Robertson's company settled the majority of the lawsuits for tens of millions of dollars. Universal Music, however, held out and took the issue to court. After the trial started, in the case of UMG v. MP3.com, MP3.com was found to have violated copyright laws and ordered to pay as much as $250 million to Universal Music Group. MP3.com paid $53.4 million to settle Universal Music's claim. This legal outcome triggered a class action complaint charging MP3.com and certain officers, including Robertson and company directors with violations of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

The action was ultimately resolved under the terms of an agreement whereby the defendants, while continuing to deny all liability, paid into an escrow account $35,000,000 and agreed to issue 2.5 million shares of MP3.com common stock which MP3.com valued at the time at $5,391,000, in exchange for complete dismissals and releases of all claims with prejudice. In addition, under the stipulations, MP3.com agreed to institute certain corporate governance enhancements.