Grooveshark Displays Echoes of Napster

Grooveshark the brainchild of a one time down on luck economics major Sam Tarantino, is being sued for copyright infringement by Universal Music Group, the lawsuit stated that Grooveshark maintained on its servers illegal copies of Universal's pre-1972 catalog, causing apple to roll back their iPhone app, the android app was similarly rolled back.

Grooveshark started as a paid music download service in 2007 and grew enormously, the Grooveshark radio was the innovation that made all the difference, functioning similar to the video recommendations that pop up at the end of a YouTube video, the Grooveshark radio allowed users to get similar music to their likes played on the radio with the choice to like or unlike the track using a smiley face or a sad face.

interfacing with social websites and the ability to interact with other users and import and exchange tracks with users let many people to fall in love with the service and because of all that On the 9th Of May 2011, the Grooveshark team did a countdown to 35,000,000 registered users.

what will happen now to Grooveshark is what we all wonder, Grooveshark’s Sr. VP of External Affairs Paul Geller released the following statement in defense

There is a distinction between legal and licensed. Laws come from Congress. Licenses come from businesses. Grooveshark is completely legal because we comply with the laws passed by Congress, but we are not licensed by every label (yet). We are a technology company, and we operate within the boundaries of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA). Some would have you believe that those of us who use the DMCA to innovate are inherently infringers and that claiming Safe Harbor under the DMCA is as good as admitting guilt. Not so.

while the statement may be true it still is weak when we think of another large service that went broke in the blink of an eye after being hit with a copyright infringement lawsuit, Napster faced an almost similar problem and they lost and eventually had to file for bankruptcy on june 3rd 2002, we hope this time around this doesn't happen and hope that the matter can come to terms for the benefit of all and especially the music hungry masses.

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