14 DAY TRIAL // The battle between Universal Music and streaming service Grooveshark is flaring back up again because of some tracks that the latter is playing, which were recorded prior to February 1972. These are covered by New York state law, rather than federal copyright, under which Grooveshark can claim safe harbor protections.
TorrentFreak reports that songs that were recorded before February 15, 1972 are covered by a different law, rather than the federal copyright legislation the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions apply.
Therefore, Grooveshark can’t claim protection like it did up until now. At the very least, it can’t do this for the “oldies but goldies” tracks that Universal Music is picking on.
“This case arises from Defendant’s massive willful copyright infringement and unfair competition in violation of New York common law,” Universal writes. It continues by saying that Escape, the company that’s behind Grooveshark, has infringed on Universal Music’s copyrighted works billions of times since it was launched, without having any kind of license.
A four-year lawsuit
The issues between the two companies started back in January 2010, when the first lawsuit was filed in a New York court. Considering the fact that it took more than four years for Universal to figure out that some of the songs Grooveshark plays aren’t covered by DMCA, it’s probably safe to say that they’ve done a lot of digging to find this loophole.
“Escape has admitted that it competes with UMG in the market for the dissemination of music over the Internet. Accordingly, it obtained an unfair competitive advantage over authorized streaming services by using UMG’s sound recordings without a license or payment,” reads the document filed by Universal Music.
The music group believes that Escape has no proper defense to their claims, which has caused the company to file several baseless counterclaims against UMG for alleged interference with contracts and business relations.
Revisiting an old issue
The dispute regarding the pre-1972 tracks isn’t anything new. In fact, back in 2011, a ruling gave Grooveshark hope that it would be able to use the same safe harbor claim for these recordings as well, but another panel reversed the decision in April 2013.
Universal Music is looking to obtain summary judgment in the next few months and this could cost Escape and Grooveshark quite a bit of money, depending on which way it goes. The case is certainly going to set a precedent, regardless of the decision the judges make.