TorrentFreak

Grooveshark’s lengthy legal battle with several of the world’s major recording labels, who accused the popular music streaming service of mass-copyright infringement, may soon come to an end. Several of the company’s (former) employees have agreed to a “consent judgment” which prohibits them from infringing the major labels’ copyrights or working with similar services in future. No settlement has been reached with the parent company yet, but the recent developments cast doubt over Grooveshark’s future.

Two years ago, Universal Music filed a lawsuit claiming that streaming music service Grooveshark carried unauthorized copies of the label’s pre-1972 music catalog on its servers. Universal’s angle was that because of the age of the music and the dating of legislation, DMCA safe harbors are not available to Grooveshark. Yesterday a judge disagreed, and this wasn’t Grooveshark’s only success. The company will now be allowed to push ahead with counterclaims said to be worth tens of millions of dollars.

Popular music streaming service Grooveshark is being sued by all the major recording labels. The lawsuits, which range from contractual disputes right up to copyright infringement, mean that the company will be tied up in litigation for months, even years to come. TorrentFreak recently managed to discuss developments with someone close to Grooveshark who told us that the company will strive to maintain an open and unlimited platform that accommodates the rightsholder.

A group of more than 30 rightsholders have won their case targeted against Grooveshark in Denmark. A court agreed that both the streaming music service and its users infringe recording label copyrights and granted an injunction forcing an ISP to initiate a block of the service. The anti-piracy group behind the action hopes that other ISPs will now follow suit.

This morning millions of Internet users in Germany have woken to find their online music listening options reduced. Music streaming service Grooveshark has self-censored in the country, citing “unreasonably high” licensing costs imposed by local music rights collections group GEMA. In other news, Grooveshark is now trying to unmask the ‘whistleblower’ who recently landed them in so much legal trouble with the major labels.

As both sides in the forthcoming Universal Music versus Grooveshark copyright infringement lawsuit prepare to do battle, a warning shot has been sounded across the bows of the currently anonymous individual whose comments set off the legal chain reaction. The alleged Grooveshark whistleblower could be unmasked following a request not from Universal, but from Grooveshark’s legal team.

In a quite astonishing lawsuit, Universal Music could be demanding hundreds of millions in damages from Grooveshark’s music streaming service. Claims in the lawsuit lay waste to Grooveshark’s insistence that they enjoy ‘safe harbor’ under the DMCA, stating categorically that bosses and other workers at the company, from the CEO down, personally uploaded many thousands of infringing tracks to the service.