Labels Allege Grooveshark Destroyed Evidence, Required That Employees Infringe
The major labels vs. Grooveshark legal battle is heating with the RIAA led consortium now asking the court to grant a summary judgement against parent company Escape Media along with founders Sam Tarantino and Joshua Greenberg. “By any objective measure, Grooveshark is a linear descendant of infringing music services such as Napster, Grokster, and LimeWire, all shuttered by federal courts for large-scale copyright infringement,” label lawyers wrote the court, alongside new damaging evidence against the music streamer.
Infringement A Job Requirement At Grooveshark
According to the filings, Grooveshark allegedly instructed employees to create user accounts and store “hundreds of thousands of digital music files on their computers”, eventually uploading them to other users and shared on Grooveshark, which at the time resembeled a P2P service.
“Thus, Defendants provided a substantial portion of the infringing content files used for the initial Grooveshark service,” say court documents. “Simply put, Defendants made it a job requirement that Escape’s employees engage in copyright infringement in order to attract users and thus benefit Defendants."
Destruction Of Evidence
The labels also allege that Grooveshark destroyed hundreds of thousands of those accounts used to upload music, including one used by founder Joshua Greenberg. “[It] is an undisputed fact that Escape’s Chief Technology Officer, Joshua Greenberg, uploaded a massive volume of infringing copyrighted works to the Grooveshark service. However, despite explicit demands to preserve such evidence, Escape systematically deleted internal database records for Greenberg’s user account.”
The new filings also allege destruction of evidence by other Grooveshark and Escape staffers; and seek punishment “for the repeated, wilful spoliation of multiple categories of key evidence… Had defendants not destroyed this evidence, it would have further demonstrated defendants’ liability for copyright infringement and exposed them to hundreds of millions of dollars in additional damages”
Sources: Law360, CMU, TorrentFreak
On behalf of all musicians everywhere. Let’s hope they bring Grooveshark down.
[[[ Really Bad Radio Deja Vu ]]]
!!!Hearing your composition of lyrical melodical intellectual property playing on the radio, but you haven’t released it yet!!!
We all should note that you can’t permanently erase digital files.
You also cannot determine:
– who may have heard the material that was stolen, before it was stolen,
– neighbors in the peripheral area of where the majority of the songwriting took place, who may be willing to back you up.
You Can Determine….
whose voice it is in the files
(obtained without information or consent) that they thought they erased permanently,….
Analyze/ identify a voice, it works just like DNA, or a fingerprint. Its called voiceprinting.
A persons voice print is unique as their DNA.
Than being said, there are people out there who did this to me, and are probably laughing thinking I’m an easy target, stupid etc.,….
I have curtailed my spontaneous lyrical improvisation to protected parameters only, and I record everything no matter how rough it sounds in its first breath.
not that the perpetrators give a flying **** but…
It is soul crushing to have some of your best material stolen and then be tormented for YEARS by having it rubbed in your face constantly by having to hear it, all the while experiencing all of the fringe benefits that poverty obscurity have to offer.
I wonder how many people out there have experienced this, but are too weirded out, bummed out, or embarrased to come forward and say anything, for fear of ridicule.
I take solace in the fact that my songwriting ability is not a finite resource, but it is a precious and unique resource and must be guarded diligently.
With awareness and unity, we can support each other in giving credit where credit is due, and/or long overdue, or fighting for it if push comes to shove. Ill lead.