In a rare case of music retailer-turned-Internet pirate, the Virgin store chain in France said Tuesday that it had been found guilty of downloading and reselling a Madonna hit without permission.
The store’s online portal, virginmega.fr, was ordered by the Paris Tribunal de Commerce to pay €600,000, or $754,000, in damages for downloading the Madonna song “Hung Up” from a France Télécom Web site that had exclusive rights to distribute the song for one week.
“This is an amazing case of simple piracy by a respected company,” Hervé Payan, senior vice president for content partnership and service at France Télécom, said Tuesday. “Virgin behaved in a surreal manner by downloading the song, cracking protection measures and then selling it from their own Web site.”
For its part, Virgin said that it had the interests of digital music consumers at heart when it broke the exclusive arrangement.
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