Music streaming service Grooveshark has started to become stricter on music piracy. The company, which heavily relies on user uploads, will keep a database with repeat offenders. The service decided to take the measures after losing a lawsuit from a record company.
Grooveshark offers users the possibility to upload music files to the streaming music service. In the past that also resulted in illegal files being uploaded to the service. The result was that Grooveshark received piracy complaints and was sued by record companies. In the past the company survived these lawsuits, but this week the company lost a case against EMI Music. An American judge ruled that Grooveshark infringed on the record company's copyright with estimated damages of about $420 million.
In its defense Grooveshark relied on the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This provision provides immunity from liability for copyright infringement by user uploads, if the company in question will respond to requests to remove infringing material. Because Grooveshark didn't block repeat offenders, the judge ruled that the service could not rely on these safe harbor provisions.
To prevent future legal issues and to comply with the latest regulations, Grooveshark now announced additional anti-piracy measures. One of them is creating a database with data of repeat offenders, the company writes on its blog. The company states it will continue to keep track of repeat offenders, "we will now create an additional independent record of repeat infringers from our existing databases, until our appeal clarifies this issue for Grooveshark and other hosting services committed to complying with the DMCA."
The company is also working on tool that offers record companies insights on what music has been uploaded to the service, "we will provide a pre-screening tool for rights holders that provides immediate access to compare uploaded files on our servers that aren't even yet available for end-user streaming with content owned by the rightsholder. When a rights holder provides a single file URL to the tool, they will receive a list of other files on our servers that have been found to be digitally different, but contain similar metadata."
The new policy is one of the many changes Grooveshark is currently making. Recently the music streaming introduced subscriptions in some countries which means that users with a free account can listen to three numbers a day for free while paid subscribers get unlimited access.
