Grooveshark faces $750 MEELLION piracy payout

Yeah, right

I wouldn't mind these high and mighty self righteous copyright monkeys so much if they made an effort to pay the artists, including the old timers that were essentially conned out of their income and whose music makes up the best of what heard these days.

Warner Bros Records....

Owned by Len Blavatnik who yesterday was announced top of the Sunday Times rich list being worth a bit over £13 billion.

I expect he will be seeing rather more of that $750 MEELLION than the artists who made the copied music.

No pocket money for Len

I suspect that the legal bills will render Grooveshark's assets such that any fine is moot.

"it emerged that executives had boosted its catalogue as a start-up, by uploading content themselves and encouraging staff to do so."

In that case, I hope the evidence is strong enough that the individuals will also be fined individually on a per song basis too. If not, then maybe that evidence isn't so strong after all.

I'd also be interested to see if the $150,000 per song fine lists the specific songs included in the fine and confirmation that the correct amount of royalties will then be passed on to the writers and performers.

Once the cosy little cabal had decided to sue I wonder how many uploads to newly minted accounts were sent from IP addresses belonging Arista Music, Sony Music Entertainment, UMG Recordings, and Warner Bros Records, etc.

So at 150,000 per song 736M works out at just 4096 songs. According to wikipedia their catalog stands at 15M tracks so that sounds pretty low?

While there's a good chance he's right, is it really the job of a judge to tell the jury that someone's actions were willful? Surely that's something the prosecution is supposed to prove in court?

But uploading material first and pay or validate later is the whole formula for Grooveshark. It's actually a good concept and completely in tune with the broader nature of the Net (not "free" in terms of money but in terms of looser, more chaotic appearing processes and less central control) and a bit ahead of the wave simply because the music industry is massively, seriously behind -- actually it's still standing at the beach, toeing the "surf". For any music service to become relevant and "modern", in my eyes at least, a massive catalogue needs to be in place to start with. Nobody has that and there's no sign of such thing on the horizon. Grooveshark made a relevant attempt but might not escape the legal red line. What should be an example of good thinking, to drag the industry along, will be another example of the industry killing everything it doesn't like because it's losing control (while they say "money" but that's not a fact at all).