14 DAY TRIAL // Last week, Universal Music Group made a rather surprising move, suing the Grooveshark, again. It's not the lawsuit that's surprising, the accusations are. Universal claims that Grooveshark employees, from the CEO downwards, uploaded pirated songs to the site.
Grooveshark enables users to upload their own songs. As you can imagine, this leads to a lot of less than legal content ending up on the site. However, under current US law, the site is protected by the DMCA "safe harbour" exemptions.
Most courts have upheld "safe harbour" protections so far. Copyright holders issue takedown notices, Grooveshark would remove the offending files and that would be that.
EMI sued the site a couple of years back, but the two companies ended up signing a deal. Universal sued last year as well, but the lawsuit didn't really go anywhere. It did give the label access to internal Grooveshark data.
And it's based on this data that it now claims that Grooveshark itself is responsible for many of the copyrighted songs on the site. The new data served as the base of a new lawsuit.
If indeed, Grooveshark employees are responsible for uploading copyrighted music, DMCA protections fly out the door. Grooveshark has now responded to the allegations, denying any wrongdoing on its part.
"We have reviewed the Complaint that Universal Music Group filed last Friday against Grooveshark in U.S. District Court in Manhattan," Grooveshark's lawyer wrote.
"Universal’s claims rest almost entirely on an anonymous, blatantly false internet blog comment and Universal's gross mischaracterization of information that Grooveshark itself provided to Universal," he said.
"While Universal has deliberately engaged the media prior to serving a copy of the Complaint on Grooveshark, Grooveshark intends to fight this battle before the Court, not in the press. Grooveshark welcomes the opportunity to present the facts to the Court and has full confidence that it will prevail in the litigation," he explained.