The ad-funded Grooveshark service lets subscribers upload music and stream tracks for free, but has been targeted by the music industry for years which says that the service impinges on copyright only licensing some of the music available on the site.
Grooveshark relies on the “safe harbour” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to insulate the company from the potentially copyright infringing actions of its 30 million users with 15m files uploaded, responding to take-down requests much in the same way as Google’s YouTube or other user-generated content services.
Judge Thomas Griesa of the US district court in Manhattan ruled on Monday in the 2011 case that despite provisions of the DMCA, Grooveshark and its parent company Escape Media Group were liable for copyright infringement by its employees who were directed to upload a total of 5,977 tracks without permission, including songs by Eminem, Green Day, Jay-Z and Madonna.
“Each time Escape streamed one of plaintiffs’ songs recordings, it directly infringed upon plaintiffs’ exclusive performance rights,” the Griesa wrote in a 57-page decision.
Chief executive Samuel Tarantino and chief technology officer Joshua Greenberg were both implicated. The company is liable to nine record companies including Arista Music, Arista Records, Atlantic Recording, Elektra Entertainment Group, LaFace Records, Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recording, Warner Brothers Records and Zomba Recording.
Griesa gave the parties 21 days to reach agreement to stop further infringement.
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