EMI granted summary judgement in Grooveshark copyright case, forcing proactive anti-piracy policy
Andy / TorrentFreak :
Context & Ripple Effects
EMI's summary judgment lands on a Grooveshark that had already lost the two things it needed to survive: music rights deals and funding to compete with licensed services. The court's remedy is procedural rather than financial — a mandated proactive anti-piracy policy — which effectively converts the service from a passive host into an active enforcer of the very catalog it never licensed.
The ruling also set the template for how labels pursued what came after Grooveshark: within weeks an anonymously run service trading on the Grooveshark name was sued and stripped of its domains, and by year-end the RIAA had extracted a $17M+ default judgment against another unidentified clone.
First-order effects
- Grooveshark is now legally required to police uploads proactively instead of reacting to takedown notices, raising its operating costs at exactly the moment its missing licenses already made it uncompetitive.
- EMI gains a precedent it can reuse across the label group without relitigating liability for each track.
Second-order effects
- Successor sites inherit the burden: the anonymous Grooveshark-named service faced immediate domain seizures, and CloudFlare later found that the DMCA doesn't shield CDNs from anti-piracy injunctions, cutting off infrastructure options for clones.
Third-order effects
- If courts keep pairing judgments with operational mandates — proactive policing here, forced account terminations against Cox in the BMG case, disconnect orders for CDN-backed clones — intermediaries stop being neutral hosts and become de facto enforcement agents for rightsholders.
The trend: Label litigation is shifting from punishing pirate services after the fact to conscripting platforms, CDNs, and ISPs into ongoing enforcement duty.