• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, January 13, 2009

Web entrepreneur Michael Robertson has battled the record industry since he pioneered digital music storage more than a decade ago with the company MP3.com.

Now, he is embroiled in litigation with the label EMI, which is suing his latest venture, MP3Tunes.com--a site launched in 2006 that enables users to store digital music in the cloud and listen to it from any Web-enabled computer. The company also runs the music search engine Sideload.com, which allows users to link to free music streams.

EMI claims that Robertson's business is unlawful because it is profiting from copyrighted tracks.

In the latest round of skirmishes, Robertson has accused EMI of hypocrisy for complaining about the availability of free tracks when the label itself streams music for free from a variety of sites. "I applaud EMI's progressiveness for widely distributing some music files for free on the net," Robertson wrote in a open letter to EMI executive Doug Merrill last week. "But what concerns me is the hypocrisy of EMI suing my company for linking to those files and giving people secure, password protected online storage for their personal music collection for both free and paid DRM-free files EMI distributes." Robertson's company also made similar arguments in recent court papers.

But EMI last week filed papers with the federal district court in New York, arguing that its decision to stream music is irrelevant to whether Robertson's business is lawful.

EMI's original complaint alleged that Robertson "built a commercial for-profit business dependent upon providing their users with access to popular copyrighted music."

The court recently dismissed EMI's case against Robertson personally, but said that the lawsuit could proceed against the company.