After a trial, a jury ruled against Mr. Robertson last week, and on Wednesday it set statutory and punitive damages. The formula to determine those damages was complex, and was estimated by lawyers involved in the case at $41 million. But it may take until next week for the final figure to be determined, according to a report by Reuters.

Mr. Robertson’s lawyers said they would challenge the damages ruling.

Several years ago, the MP3tunes case was seen as an important test for the legality of cloud locker systems, but in a changed market its significance is unclear. Amazon, Google and others had initially introduced unlicensed lockers, but to avoid liability for infringement, and also to streamline their product — maintaining a legal but unlicensed service often involved backing up millions of redundant files — most of those companies eventually struck licensing deals with record companies and music publishers.

Over the years, the parties involved in the case also went through changes. In late 2011, E.M.I. was split up in a $4.1 billion deal that gave most of E.M.I.'s record label operations to Universal and its music publishing division to Sony. In 2012 Mr. Robertson shut down MP3tunes and declared it bankrupt; his new company, DAR.fm, records digital copies of radio programs.

Mr. Robertson is well known in the digital music world for founding MP3.com, one of the first major online music companies, in 1997. It later went public and made Mr. Robertson a millionaire, but the site was also sued by the major labels, and eventually shut down and sold. MP3.com is now owned by CBS.

During the MP3tunes trial, Mr. Robertson said that the company canceled the accounts of users who abused the locker system. In a statement on Thursday, he accused the music industry of suing his company “to send a message to others not to partner with us or to emulate our business,” and criticized the system of statutory damages for copyright infringement, which led to charges of up to $100,000 per song.