Music download client Mulve has become a very popular app in a short time, drawing the attention of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The music trade group issued a DMCA take down after finding Mulve was partially hosted by Hostgator, a company based in the United States and within the RIAA's reach. Due to the take down request, the Mulve application was not available for download on Tuesday.
Mulve already has a new product in the works, but a release date hasn't been publicized. As the site quickly pushes out the latest release, there will be an even larger group of users anxious to download music before the program’s possible shutdown.
TorrentFreak first discussed Mulve last week -- and news spread extremely fast -- as the official website handled huge amount of traffic spikes. The site's downtime on Tuesday, however, was caused by the RIAA takedown, not too much Internet traffic.
This was an expected move from the RIAA, as they look for a permanent solution to ban Mulve. Another major cause for alarm to the RIAA is the ability to anonymously and quickly download files -- Mulve is a 1.9MB .exe file that is extremely easy to use.
Ironically, the Mulve website now links to a torrent when you click on the "Download" button, allowing users to obtain the app through the BitTorrent protocol, even though the application does not use BitTorrent itself.
Mulve reportedly includes a 10,000,000 song library hosted on servers located outside of the United States. It instantly became popular because the program does not rely on peer-to-peer technology for users to download files, as the files are stored on servers located in other parts of the world.
Mulve will be released to the public again in the future, but it's long-term future is still unknown. The RIAA and other music copyright groups will tirelessly work to have the program shut down permanently, especially as more people learn about the program and it becomes even more popular.
