Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group are priming to file a lawsuit against online music streaming service, Grooveshark. That lawsuit could be filed as early as today (Thursday). The lawsuit will likely claim that employees of Grooveshark have posted pirated songs to the service.
This case follows a similar one filed about a month ago by Universal Music against Grooveshark. That case claimed employees posted over 100,000 pirated songs. Grooveshark quickly defended themselves in that case calling it a “gross mischaracterization of information.”
While Grooveshark has yet to see this current lawsuit that Sony and Warner are concocting, they were quick to emphasize that they will defend themselves in this case as well.
"We cannot comment on litigation we have not seen, but will aggressively defend ourselves in court," the company said in an e-mailed statement. "Grooveshark is a company founded on our love of music and our passion to give musicians a platform to reach audiences worldwide. We respect the intellectual property of all artists, and our strict policies are designed to ensure that they only upload content to which they are entitled."
Grooveshark stands by the fact that they cannot be held liable for copyright violations made by their users per the protection of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s safe harbor. In order to be protected by this safe harbor clause, the website in question must promptly remove copyrighted material once it is informed of it by the copyright owner via a take-down notice.
We’ll have to see how this case plays out but it’s definitely been nothing but setbacks and lawsuits for Grooveshark in the past few months with the Universal Music complaint, this impending Sony/Warner complaint, and Google removing the site's app from the Android Marketplace. Do any of you use Grooveshark? What do you think of this incoming lawsuit against the site?
