Mulve music downloader app operator arrested, service shut down

Police in the UK have reportedly arrested the operators of the music downloading application Mulve, an event that has prompted the permanent closure of the service.

The short-lived application was launched in May of this year and was a search engine that allowed users to download tracks from a 10,000,000 song library from servers hosted by the Russian social network Vkontakte.

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Mulve essentially flew under the radar until just a couple of weeks ago when TorrentFreak discussed the application, which resulted in worldwide attention. Unfortunately, it also turned the heads of the RIAA, who then quickly issued a DMCA take down of the application on September 28th. Though the servers queried by Mulve were hosted outside of the RIAA’s jurisdiction, the group was able to succeed with the take down since the application had some hosting with Hostgator which is in the US. The operators were, however, able to bring the service back up with alternate hosting within 48 hours, but the revival would last little more than a week.

After being arrested by police in the UK earlier this week, Mulve’s operators decided to close down the service for good. On October 7th, the website was replaced by a message notifying users of the news:

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“Err. Following severe legal issues, we have decided to take the website/application offline for good.
We have received too much unneeded attention, and in order to be able to continue living our lives we do not want to fight this. We ask you not to create any clones which are credited to us (chances are you'll probably forget about us shortly, anyway and move onto something else).”

They added that the project had “snowballed out of control” and issued an apology and thanks.

It’s not clear at this point what grounds the UK authorities used to make the arrest, but it seems clear that the action had to do with the legality of the Mulve service.

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As TorrentFreak points out, bringing criminal charges against Mulve seems rather absurd due to the fact that it was simply a search engine. The service did not host any files, and holding the application creators responsible for illegal actions of the users would be like holding Google responsible for any illegal activity people use the search engine to accomplish.

While this marks the end of Mulve, the code for the application has been released so it is quite likely that a similar service will pop up and continue this battle.

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