In an unlikely turn of events, several hip-hop artists, including 2 Live Crew and the Ying Yang Twins, have banded together with eccentric billionaire Alki David in filing a lawsuit against CBS Interactive and its subsidiary, CNET, for allegedly promoting illegal downloading. In what some say is merely an act of retaliation for CBS’s litigation against his own company, FilmOn, Alki David recruited a random collection of rappers, including JT Money, The Force MD’s, J-Shin, R&B group Pretty Ricky and members of 2 Live Crew and the Ying Yang Twins, to join him in the class action suit against CBS. According to the lawsuit, popular filesharing program LimeWire was downloaded over 220 million times from CBS website CNET (also known as Download.com), and CBS received “massive amounts of revenue from P2P providers” via advertising on the website. The Hollywood Reporter has revealed that the plaintiffs seek billions in damages over the perceived copyright violations enabled by file-sharing programs like LimeWire, Morpheus and several others.

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