Major Labels Easily Win Lawsuit Against Grooveshark

Copyright

from the as-expected dept

This isn’t a huge surprise given how similar lawsuits have gone, but the various major record labels (including Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music) more or less won all of their arguments against Grooveshark in a ruling yesterday. As the ruling makes clear, Grooveshark’s founders more or less sunk themselves into a deep, deep hole early on by effectively admitting that their plan was to encourage lots and lots of infringement to grow really big — and then hope that the labels would eventually do licensing deals based on their size (which actually worked, ever so briefly, with EMI). The piles of evidence supporting the early actions of the company and its execs is pretty damning, and more or less undermines the company’s later claims that it was really no different from YouTube. Just the fact that company execs specifically went and reuploaded songs that were taken down by DMCA notices is incredibly damning.

Basically, Grooveshark didn’t even do anything to hide its attempts to infringe. There are cases where the evidence can be read in multiple ways — including the Megaupload situation, where many of the charges against the company seem to involve taking statements out of context. But with Grooveshark, the evidence is pretty damning that the company and its execs not only knew that what they were doing was illegal, but actively sought to do more infringing things without regard to the legal impact of those decisions. Hell, the company’s own DMCA alert system sent notices to tons of the company’s own employees — including top execs — for uploading infringing works. On top of that, there was some suggestion that Grooveshark then sought to delete or hide the evidence of those uploads.

Basically, almost everything Grooveshark did was incredibly stupid under the law. And they got caught for it, and will now have to pay up.

Take, for example, this internal forum post one of the company’s co-founders posted to everyone at the company:

Please share as much music as possible from outside the office, and leave your computers on whenever you can. This initial content is what will help to get our network started?it?s very important that we all help out! If you have available hard drive space on your computer, I strongly encourage you to fill it with any music you can find. Download as many MP3?s as possible, and add them to the folders you?re sharing on Grooveshark. Some of us are setting up special ?seed points? to house tens or even hundreds of thousands of files, but we can?t do this alone? There is no reason why ANYONE in the company should not be able to do this, and I expect everyone to have this done by Monday? IF I DON?T HAVE AN EMAIL FROM YOU IN MY INBOX BY MONDAY, YOU?RE ON MY OFFICIAL SHIT LIST.

And there’s this:

In 2009, Escape received numerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act (?DMCA?) takedown notifications from copyright holders demanding that it remove infringing copies of popular copyrighted songs from Grooveshark…. These ?takedown? notices threatened to diminish the Grooveshark music library…. As a result, Escape considered various methods so that users would not be denied access to any songs because specific infringing files were removed…. As part of this process, Escape?s senior officers searched for infringing songs that had removed in response to DMCA takedown notices and re-uploaded infringing copies of those songs to Grooveshark to ensure that the music catalog remained complete.

And then this one, on one of the co-founders (and the company’s CTO) not just getting a bunch of DMCA notices (the ruling doesn’t even get into the fact that it’s obvious that the company’s repeat infringer policy wasn’t working, even if it was in place), but then having evidence disappear:

Greenberg received over thirty-nine DMCA notification letters from Escape for uploading 687 files to Grooveshark…. This means that Greenberg uploaded at least 687 sound recordings onto Grooveshark and that the UsersFiles should reflect these uploads….

[….]

Plaintiffs requested that Escape produce any archived copies of Greenberg?s uploading records and explain why his data was missing…. Defendants confirmed that no archived copies of Greenberg?s records exist…. Given Escape?s practices with respect to the creation and storage of upload data on the UsersFiles, Dr. Horowitz, plaintiffs? expert, concluded that defendants deleted the uploading records associated with Greenberg?s account.

In most other cases like this, there are often important legal issues, and frequent attempts at distorting what actually happened. But in this case, it honestly looks like Grooveshark just flat out did everything possible to infringe on copyrights at every turn, directly encouraging employees to do so, and having a stated policy of trying to infringe as much as possible to get as big an audience as possible in the belief that the labels would then license. It didn’t work and the company and its founders are going down because of it.

Filed Under: copyright, dmca
Companies: escape media, grooveshark, sony music, universal music, warner music