Music business alert: this may be technical but totally relates to your listening habits. Grooveshark and Universal Music are in the midst of a lawsuit, and things are getting very interesting.
The simple, in-a-nutshell explanation is that Universal Music is suing Grooveshark for copyright violation. This may have at first glance looked liked a callous attempt at an old major trying to take down a new media upstart, but it’s deeper than that. Court reports released on Nov. 25 have revealed some possible shady Grooveshark policies.
According to court documents that were released and internal emails from Sina Simantob, chairmain of Grooveshark, Grooveshark did not ask permission to stream songs from Universal. According to the emails, Grooveshark chose to seek forgiveness instead of paying royalties for playing Universal’s copyrighted songs.
According to Cnet, Simantob explained in an email that Grooveshark planned to wait until songs hit more than 100 million unique listeners, then try to leverage those big numbers and use the data obtained from its users to sell to the labels a la Facebook.
Grooveshark offered a general denial and a refusal to respond to any allegations in the news media. Read more details about the case at Billboard and Cnet. Expect plenty more to come from this lawsuit in the future.
What say you ‘Stachers? Is Universal in the right? Is Grooveshark in trouble?
