After being very well received and its existence reported in dozens of news outlets, in early October things took a turn for the worse. TorrentFreak learned that police in the UK had arrested an individual in connection with the application and we were told in no uncertain terms – Mulve was finished.

For the first time, we can now reveal exactly what happened.

“On the 6th of October, at approximately 8am a group of unidentified men entered my apartment and only later identified themselves as police officers. They then went ahead to confiscate all my electronic equipment. Laptops, flash drives, cell phones etc.”

These are the words of Eric, the guy who registered the Mulve domain and the person we referred to in our earlier articles under the pseudonym ‘John’. Eric had nothing whatsoever to do with the coding of Mulve, another individual was responsible.

“I am the sole author of the program. Eric has never even seen the source code, neither does he know how to program,” Mulve coder ms3arch told TorrentFreak earlier. “The reason they went for Eric was because the domain was in his name for 1 day.”

Eric confirmed this morning that the authorities had indeed tracked him through a non-private WHOIS listing. He’d also innocently revealed his identity in videos and elsewhere.

After being taken away for questioning, the grounds for Eric’s arrest were explained:

- Copyright Infringement
- Conspiracy to Defraud (the same charges which failed so massively against OiNK)
- Distributing an article which would cause loss of money to third parties

Eric informed us that what followed was 6 weeks of police bail. Fortunately, as no incriminating evidence was found to support the accusations levelled against him (surprise, surprise), Eric has now been told he is free to go. He will have to wait for the return of all his equipment though, that won’t return until next week.

One has to wonder if these actions in the UK should be allowed to continue. The police are clearly being influenced and pressured by the music industry to take action, and they are taking the bait – hook, line and sinker. If the industry is so convinced they can get a conviction, perhaps they should try to do so through the civil courts where the burden of proof is much lower?

As it stands the British tax-payer is picking up the bill for these pointless efforts which achieve nothing other than to turn the lives of people like Eric upside down and raise awareness of services such as those offered by Vkontakte.

“Here’s a public thanks to all the readers and individuals who made this ordeal easier for us,” says Eric as he puts this ordeal behind him.

What will follow from Eric now is a new and completely legal music project. Eric is very, very keen to stay absolutely on the right side of the law this time. Of course, we’ll keep everyone informed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

However, as we pointed out in a follow-up article, Mulve-style functionality could be achieved in a number of different ways, but none of them really added anything to the original experience.

But now, Mielophone – a new app from a small team of Russian coders – takes the Mulve idea and pumps it full of performance enhancing substances.

“Basically there’s two of us. There was also guy who created a design for the app but he disappeared somewhere,” programmer Yamalight told TorrentFreak.

While Yamalight is a guitar-playing martial artist currently doing a PhD in Europe, his partner in the project, Recoilme, simply describes himself as a music lover.

“Our motivation to create Mielophone was pretty simple. After last.fm (and all other online radios like Spotify etc) became completely paid in Russia (‘cos they couldn’t get an agreement with local music labels etc.), there was no more sites to just listen to music or discover new stuff, or do any of cool things from last.fm,” Yamalight explained.

“So we decided to write our own app that combines all cool services into one thing.”

Once installed and run, the Mielephone interface is pretty self-explanatory. While one can search for individual tracks by clicking the ‘Tracks’ tab, music discovery can also take place using the ‘Albums’ tab. By clicking here and entering an artist or band name, a selection of album covers will appear as shown below (left). Clicking an album cover will automatically switch to the tracks view where all tracks in the chosen album will be displayed (shown below, right).

Selecting single tracks for listening in the integrated player (which also has a playlist editor) is as simple as left clicking them while download queuing is achieved with a right click. Queuing the entire album is achieved with the ‘Download all’ button in the bottom right of the track window. All chosen tracks will then be transferred to the ‘Downloads’ tab where queued but unwanted tracks can be deleted with a right click.

Downloading all queued tracks is done with a click of the floppy disc icon. Download folder location can be configured in Options/Settings.

Clicking the ‘Artist’ tab will bring up a bio of the artist in question (albeit currently in Russian) and selecting the adjacent ‘Video’ tab willl, unsurprisingly, give a collage of artist videos which can be either be viewed in the app or a web browser.

But Mielophone isn’t done yet. Aside from the selectable music sources (listed in ‘Options’) and YouTube, three other online services are also utilized.

First off, MusicBrainz is used to get albums and tracklists and was chosen for its accuracy. Last.fm is used for a number of functions including obtaining artist info and covers, to generate radio by tag, to get the top 100 songs by artist (right click, track view, excellent for discovery), and to scrobble. Lyrics.com use is self-explanatory and again accessed with a right click in the track view.

Mielophone requires Adobe’s AIR to run and was chosen in order to service users of multiple operating systems and to ensure they get new versions of the software as soon as they become available.

“The first versions of Mielophone were actually written in like 3 or 4 different languages, but when lots of people started to ask us for a version for Mac and Linux we decided to switch to AIR which has all the stuff we need and works great under all OSs,” said Yamalight.

Development of Mielophone is still underway and users of more operating systems will be able to enjoy it soon – there is already iOS and Android versions on the way.

The Mielophone homepage can be found here, and the ‘install now’ button is the most user friendly option for those without AIR already installed.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Although it had been around for a few months, this ‘second coming’ of Mulve was very well received and it was covered by dozens of news outlets. Last week, however, things turned sour. TorrentFreak learned that police in the UK had arrested an individual in connection with the application and it was made very clear to us immediately – Mulve would never, ever be coming back.

Clearly someone had put the fear of God into those behind the software. We can now reveal exactly where that fear came from. In common with the case against OiNK admin Alan Ellis, the arrest was made not on copyright issues, but on grounds of Conspiracy to Defraud.

After the case against Ellis ended in complete failure, the police – who had undoubtedly been prompted into action by the Big Four record labels – had unbelievably chosen to go with the same accusation against Mulve. But, as we will read, on even more tenuous grounds.

To understand exactly how fragile the accusations are, TorrentFreak has been speaking with ‘ms3arch’, a programmer who wrote a very interesting piece of code two years ago. The relevance of this open source work will soon become clear.

“In 2008, I found out that Vkontakte had this huge database of music, and that most Internet-savvy Russians no longer download music, they just stream using Vkontakte,” ms3arch told TorrentFreak.

“I did not like the interface of Vkontakte. It was too simplistic for me. So I created a different interface to it. At first it was single-threaded and really slow, but then I evolved it.”

Up until this year, the code created by ms3arch had a hardcoded login and password for Vkontakte (VK). However, once logged in it acquired a cookie from VK which actually didn’t expire for a year, so all further access to the site could be achieved by using that cookie.

When operating the software, users could carry out a search which went off in the form of an HTTP request to VK’s on-site search. The results that it returned were sent back to the software and displayed for the user. Further code enabled the software to work out the bitrate of the track and a link where it can be found on VK.

Then in 2010, ms3arch’s code was rebranded and Mulve was born.

Along with this change came a modification to the code. Every VK account has a limit on the amount of music that can be searched for, so rather than having a single hard-coded user account buried inside the application, a server was set up containing the login details for around 1,000 previously acquired VK accounts.

“So basically, the Mulve client connected to the central server and fetched login details from it,” ms3arch explained.

“If any login was invalid, and the client could not log in using those details, it told the server and received a new login. After 15 reports the account was blacklisted and taken out of the loop. However, if before those 15 tries accumulated another client was able to login with the same details, then the re-try count was reset, making the system abuse-resistant.”

So at this point, let’s just recap a few key facts.

1) Mulve nor its almost identical predecessor ever hosted in any music
2) All music is hosted by Vkontakte and is freely available to any member
3) Mulve is not a search engine, it is merely an alternative interface for VK’s search
4) Mulve never sees the searches carried out by users, they go direct to VK
5) Mulve nor its predecessor was ever promoted for infringing uses

And yet the police, almost certainly prompted by the BPI with the backing of IFPI, went on to arrest a man in the UK last week (we will call him John for the moment) on suspicion of Conspiracy to Defraud.

“I am the sole author of the program. John has never even seen the source code, neither does he know how to program,” ms3arch told TorrentFreak. “The reason they went for John was because the domain was in his name for 1 day.”

Ms3arch told us that he had considered telling this story using his real name, but decided against it – for now at least.

“Instead, I decided to add a cryptic entry to Facebook (if you look at the last one, you will see a SHA1 hash there at the end). Only I know how [to access] that cryptic entry, and if I ever need to use the ‘fame’ received from Mulve, I can.”

So what, if anything, is John guilty of? Well it seems that he made the tutorial video and registered the Mulve domain name to show a piece of software that isn’t even a search engine, but merely an alternative interface for one aspect of one of the world’s biggest social networking sites.

John, who is understandably extremely upset, told TorrentFreak that Mulve had hoped to partner with Thumbplay and use the app’s popularity to help new artists get discovered.

Instead, John faces charges of Conspiracy to Defraud and that dream lies in shreds.

Did the BPI, IFPI and the police learn anything after filing exactly the same charges against Alan Ellis of OiNK and failing miserably? Can they not see that this case is hugely weaker? Mulve isn’t even a search engine, it’s an interface for a search engine!

Let’s just hope that the Crown Prosecution Service, who will decide whether to take this case to court, will see some sense.

If the music industry had left Mulve alone, with zero marketing budget the app would’ve probably bounced along largely under the mainstream radar, but instead they have succeeded in attracting even more attention it to. The outcome is predictable.

Today, FileShareFreak brings news that Mulve has been resurrected in at least two different ways.

We haven’t tested PirateApp or Mulve Phoenix, but something we have been playing with is a rather handy plug in for Firefox.

After installing the VKontakte.ru Downloader and spending 5 mins making an account at VK.com, you’re ready to go. Simply click in the ‘Search’ box at the top of the page and choose “by audio file” from the drop down box.

All search results will be displayed with the usual ‘play’ icon for streaming and right next to that will be a new icon. Press that and the chosen track is downloaded. It really is that simple and absolutely no Mulve in sight.

TorrentFreak recommends using these tools to find music on VK that isn’t on IFPI, BPI and RIAA labels. One, we don’t want to be the next people subjected to baseless accusations of Conspiracy to Defraud, and two, because there is quality musical life beyond the Big Four if only people would take the time to look for it.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

After news of Mulve travelled quickly around the world, the site went offline, unable to cope with the demand.

After an upgrade the site returned, only to disappear again a short time later. This time it wasn’t due to excessive demand, but due to the lawyers at the RIAA.

Mulve, which is an abbreviation for ‘Music Love’, came back online, but the return was short-lived. This week the site disappeared and software stopped functioning again, but under entirely more ominous circumstances.

From speaking with the operators of Mulve, TorrentFreak has learned that police in the UK made arrests in connection with the site a few days ago. We are aware of the grounds for arrest but until the Mulve guys can get their bearings and attempt to come to terms with what has happened, that information will have to wait until another day.

What we can give, however, is our opinion. And our opinion is this. Regardless of what people may have used chosen to use Mulve for, its creators simply cannot be held liable for that. To bring criminal action against them seems utterly absurd.

Mulve was simply a search engine. It did not organize music in any way other than returning results based on user searches. Mulve hosted no music on its servers, but instead pulled it from hardware owned by Vkontakte, Russia’s biggest social networking site.

Is Mulve alone in this respect? Absolutely not. In fact, to find a similar piece of software one needs to look no further than Apple’s App Store.

VKontakte Music is available there for the princely sum of ‘FREE’ (Pro version $0.99) and the only additional requirement is a login for Vkontakte which requires Google translate, an email address and 5 minutes of a user’s time.

As can be seen from the screenshot above taken from iTunes itself, this app even shows copyright songs as examples of items for download. Mulve never even went that far so for the police to get involved seems nothing short of ridiculous.

After the failure to convict the operator of OiNK, stand by for another major embarrassment in the UK. This time the case is even more weak.

Mulve’s code has been released and will live on, no matter what happens.

Update:

“Just letting you know that following arrests, we have decided to take Mulve offline for good. We do not want to fight this,” Mulve told TorrentFreak.

“Hell, I am not prepared to spend the next 5 years in prison for a project that was simply meant to be a little bit of fun. We would like to apologise to all those who were affected by this.”

TorrentFreak also learned that the arrested guy wasn’t actually involved in the programming of the application but since it’s believed he made the video demo the authorities have put two and two together to arrive at the outcome detailed above.

One thing is clear in all of this though, Mulve is never coming back.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Choice aside, Mulve is particularly fast too. Searches yield results quickly and tracks download at excellent speeds, yet this software is not a traditional P2P app – in fact, there is no uploading required at all. Pulling its data off fast servers in Russia connected to the country’s biggest social networking site, downloading from Mulve is about as ‘safe’ as it gets.

Last week, after generating dozens of headlines and excitement around the Internet’s tech sites, Mulve’s homepage went offline, unable to cope with the demand.

TorrentFreak has learned that the site was getting more than 30,000 visitors a day and they were carrying out around 15000 searches every hour.

The site soon returned but those wanting to use the software today, however, will have problems. It is completely down, not due to excessive demand, but due to the lawyers at the RIAA.

“Just letting you know that Mulve has received a DMCA take down request from the RIAA, so it needed to be taken offline,” a Mulve spokesman told TorrentFreak.

While Mulve hosted no illegal files, it appears that the RIAA discovered that a small element of the site was hosted with US-based Hostgator. Once that element was taken down it was enough to effectively disable the site.

It is understood that Mulve has a new update in the pipeline which will improve the application, but there is currently no news on when the site and application will return. TorrentFreak is assured, however, the downtime is just temporary.

In the meantime, as we wait for news, we can ponder on the meaning behind the word ‘Mulve’.

“It is an abbreviation for Music Love,” the developers told us.

Update: The site’s back up (for now).

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

This particular application, called Mulve, comes in a package of just 2mb and once unzipped reveals two files, the installer itself and a text file on how to donate to the project.

Of course, people tend to panic that this type of software may contain some sort of virus or malware, but Mulve seems to be clean. The results of 43 virus scanners show that only two feel that the file may be suspicious, which seems to suggest a false positive on their behalf. For the purposes of a review, we’ll take a chance….

So what is Mulve? Here are its creators describing their product:

Originating from computer adept backgrounds, two guys, both musicians, met one day. After a drink, it was final, they decided to start developing a program like no other, something that would allow people to find a tune they wanted, no slower than a click of a button.

Mulve, is just that program. After years of development we wanted to bring you something that you would enjoy loading up, something that was not for personal gain or for money. Something that could run flawlessly without so much as a momentary hiccup. Something that would prove to be a monumental breakthrough in terms of music discovery.

Big claims like these are hard to live up to, but we’ve tested Mulve and it delivers – with style.

The software requires no further installation once unpacked and runs directly from the 1.9mb .exe file. Once running the user simply enters a search – below we’ve shown a couple of the results available for songs by Dan Bull of ‘Dear Lily’ and ‘Dear Mandy’ fame (because he’s a cool guy and a friend of ours).

Rest assured though, searches for just about any song brings up a wealth of results and in many cases lead to high quality MP3s, right up to 320kbs.

Download speeds are very impressive too. There’s hardly any time to max out your connection with a download since transfers are over so quickly. It doesn’t really get much better than that.

So what’s the deal here, from a file-sharing perspective?

Well, Mulve is not a shared-folder type application like LimeWire and it isn’t based around BitTorrent. It isn’t a Google-search type application pulling MP3s off open directories on websites either. In fact, there is absolutely no sharing at all and files seem to come straight from servers designed for the job.

This means that users downloading with Mulve cannot be tracked by anti-P2P companies since they are doing no uploading. If it continues, a nightmare scenario for the music industry.

Too good to be true? At this stage it’s hard to tell. However, FileShareFreak has been in touch with the creators of Mulve and asked them where their application is pulling music from – here is their response:

Without giving too much away, I can tell you that we are obviously not a P2P client and in fact we don’t search open FTPs. Instead we directly connect to a few other servers overseas which store the music. Unfortunately, I cannot reveal which these are.

Earlier, TorrentFreak carried out some tests of our own using Wireshark on half a dozen randomly selected tracks. On those it appeared that the music was coming from Russian servers connected to Vkontakte, a huge social networking site.

Other music could originate from elsewhere but with an alleged 10 million tracks to test, it could be a big task to find out.

Mulve appears to be operating on a donate basis at the moment and currently has a target of just $500. It is also selling advertising space.

The program itself looks very basic but when getting music becomes this easy, will anyone care? Probably not.

Nevertheless, Mulve really does seem to be too good to be true and with that in mind, we’re still watching with caution. Let’s see what it turns into in future – if it has one.

Mulve can be obtained here.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.