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Grooveshark Found Guilty of Massive Copyright Infringement

An anonymous reader writes: If you're a Grooveshark user, you should probably start backing up your collection. In a decision (PDF) released Monday, the United States District Court in Manhattan has found Grooveshark guilty of massive copyright infringement based on a preponderance of internal emails, statements from former top executives, direct evidence from internal logs, and willfully deleted files and source code. An email from Grooveshark's CTO in 2007 read, "Please share as much music as possible from outside the office, and leave your computers on whenever you can. This initial content is what will help to get our network started—it’s very important that we all help out! ... Download as many MP3’s as possible, and add them to the folders you’re sharing on Grooveshark. Some of us are setting up special 'seed points' to house tens or even hundreds of thousands of files, but we can’t do this alone." He also threatened employees who didn't contribute.

4 of 171 comments (clear)

  1. Their hard drives didn't crash? by DaHat · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clearly the management of Grooveshark didn't have the forethought of those at the IRS did to ensure that hard drives containing potentially incriminating emails disappear.

  2. Some content should be avoided... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I worked at a video game company prior to the dot com bust, one of the QA supervisors kept pestering me to contribute to the internal MP3 server. So I did. I brought in my collection of Patsy Cline CDs, ripped on my workstation, and transferred to the MP3 server. My contribution to the communal music collection was deleted within five minutes and the supervisor stopped pestering me.

  3. Re:Why? by Minwee · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why did I perform a search on Yahoo!?

    At all?

  4. Re:Why? by pushing-robot · · Score: 5, Funny

    Because my Altavista bookmark is forwarding me there now. When did this happen?

    Oh well, I guess I'll try that new "Hotbot".

    --
    How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?