30 Seconds to Mars [ tickets ] frontman, Jared Leto, said the $30 million his record company is seeking in a lawsuit is "ridiculously oversized, totally unrealistic and pretty silly (but slightly clever)," according to a post on the band's MySpace page.

The post, a response to the suit filed last week by EMI/Virgin Records, claims the band was not sued for failing to deliver music to the label. "We have been sued by the corporation quite simply because roughly 45 days ago we exercised our legal right to terminate our old, out of date contract, which, according to the law is null and void," Leto said.

Leto was not specific as to why the band decided to exercise the right to end the deal, rather he simply said the bands representatives could not get EMI to agree to make a fair and reasonable deal. However, he does note that the band's financial deal with the label and changes at EMI contributed to the band's decision to terminate the contract.

"If you think the fact that we have sold in excess of 2 million records and have never been paid a penny is pretty unbelievable, well, so do we," Leto said in the statement. "And the fact that EMI informed us that not only aren't they going to pay us AT ALL but that we are still $1.4 million dollars in debt to them is even crazier.... Shouldn't a record company be able to turn a profit from selling that many records? Or, at the very least, break even? We think so."

Leto also said the new regime at EMI fired most of the people the band had worked with when they signed the deal. He also complains that the record company wanted to place advertisements on the band's website and that, under their old contract, EMI owns the masters of 30 Seconds to Mars' recordings.

So the band, which had been signed to the recording contract for nine years, evoked a California law that says one cannot be bound to a contract for more than seven years, according to the statement. "It is a law that protects people from lengthy, unfair, career-spanning contracts," Leto said.