UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000) was a landmark case of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York concerning the unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials on the Internet. The case concerned unauthorized duplication by the company MP3.com of songs from a wide selection of compact discs for the purposes of launching a service that allowed users to access their private music collections online from anywhere in the world. This business model was ruled to be a violation of U.S. copyright law. Background Upon the rise of music file sharing by consumers on the Internet, MP3,com conceived a new service in early 2000 called My.MP3.com that allowed users to rip songs from compact discs that they had already purchased legitimately, then upload the resulting MP3 files to an account managed by MP3.com. The users would then be able to log into their accounts from any device anywhere in the world, and listen to the music that they had previously uploaded. Users quickly compiled a library of over 80,000 albums, with all songs stored on servers at MP3.com. The company also attempted to expand the library by buying tens of thousands of albums on compact disc itself, and adding those to the library to be accessed by its users. To use the service, the My.MP3.com subscriber had to "confirm" that they had legitimately purchased the CD by placing it in their computer's CD drive while logged in to My.MP3.com, thus allowing a purchase code to be recorded by the service. A subscriber could also purchase a CD from one of defendant's cooperating online retailers. Despite this process, the record companies argued that MP3.com had made few efforts to ensure that the songs being uploaded by its users had in fact been legitimately purchased in CD form. Eleven different record companies, with UMG Recordings serving as the lead plaintiff, sued MP3.com for failing to secure permission for copies of songs that were created automatically when users uploaded ripped songs to the company's servers. MP3.com argued that the owners of compact discs were entitled to make copies of copyrighted songs that they had purchased legitimately, and give them to any selected party (including an online service) per the fair use defense in American copyright law, as well as the first sale doctrine. MP3.com also claimed that its business plan helped the record industry