<\/a>User-uploaded content, however, may not bear the entire burden of guilt. Rather than suing Grooveshark directly, Universal filed their claims against the site\u2019s parent company, Escape Media Group, Inc. and seven of Grooveshark\u2019s executives. Universal\u2019s lawsuit accuses Grooveshark CEO Samuel Tarantino of personally uploading a minimum of 1, 791 songs and other executives of uploading as many as 40,000 for a total of 113, 777 songs uploaded by Grooveshark executives and staff. If these accusations are true, uploading by executives and staff of the site is a clear move outside of the DCMA safe harbor act.<\/p>\nIn addition to personal uploading by executives, an anonymous post on Digital Music News from an individual claiming to be a Grooveshark employee revealed that Grooveshark staff were assigned a weekly amount of uploads to the database, as well as that the website has a protocol for filling holes in its catalog. Even holes left by songs removed to honor DMCA takedown requests. Universal cited this disclosure in its recently filed lawsuit. Again, the DMCA safe harbor act wouldn’t protect these actions. The identity of the anonymous poster hasn’t been disclosed, and his or her employment at Grooveshark and the truth of the claims has yet to be confirmed, but Universal also says they have communication from Grooveshark that corroborates with this information.<\/p>\n
Prior rulings in copyright infringement cases indicate that the lawsuit against Grooveshark could go either way. In 2010, YouTube and Google won a significant battle against Viacom; the judge granted YouTube\u2019s request for summary dismissal of the case on the grounds that the safe harbor of the DMCA protects the site. In the case of Capitol Records, Inc. vs. MP3tunes, LLC, another judge ruled that DMCA safe harbor protected this music downloading service. Also in 2010, however, the Arista Records prevailed in a case against file-sharing program LimeWire using the same tactics \u2013 suing company executives \u2013 that Universal has chosen to use against Grooveshark; LimeWire agreed to pay $105 million and disable versions 5.5.11 and higher of LimeWire<\/p>\n
It’s impossible at this time to tell what the fate of Grooveshark may be. Grooveshark believes that the DMCA\u2019s \u201csafe harbor\u201d protects the site because they have honored DMCA takedown requests in an expeditious manner. If the accusations against Grooveshark executives surrounding personal uploading to the site or orders to staff to upload and fill missing songs in the database are true, however, Universal has a much stronger case. Universal\u2019s tactics have already won a significant battle in the media and the public eye, because this most recent set of lawsuits has drawn a lot of coverage and brought more attention to the website\u2019s questionable operating procedures and failure to honor the requests of artists. Even if the court rules in Grooveshark\u2019s favor, the site will either have to modify its method of operation or continue to deal with an endless stream of lawsuits and artist complaints to stop disenfranchising the musicians that their site relies on to survive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Friday, November 18, Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against online music streaming website Grooveshark, suing the site for $17 billion worth of copyright infringement and damages. Grooveshark has had several skirmishes with copyright infringement and lawsuit since the site was founded in 2007, but none that equal the lawsuit filed by Universal. Grooveshark […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":6197,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,46,908,38,40],"tags":[1715,1718,1717,564,1716,1357,230,1714],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6190"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6190"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6562,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6190\/revisions\/6562"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/techcitement.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}