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Business News Digital
Everyone’s talking about Mulve
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 27 September 2010
So Mulve, the latest illegal music service to reach the internet, has suddenly become the talk of the town, despite being initially launched earlier this summer.
Mulve is a bit of software which can be downloaded to any PC, and which then provides access to a load of free music. The tracks come from mysterious servers somewhere on the internet, believed to be hosted in Russia.
It’s been set up by two guys seemingly without commercial motives, with the costs of operating the software met by donations and, it seems to be hoped, advertising. It’s estimated there are some 10 million songs available via the platform.
It is, of course, a service that totally infringes the copyrights of those who own the music featured in its catalogue, and given the buzz surrounding the service late last week – enough to overwhelm the Mulve website – one assumes the legal teams at the major record companies will be on the case this morning.
Given the mysterious origins of the source content the Mulve client accesses, the service’s operators could distance themselves from those servers and claim they are not guilty of direct infringement. Still, the case for contributory or authorising infringement would be pretty uncontroversial, though any legal action could take months or years to go through the motions.
Which was why the BPI was pushing for a faster injunction system to be included in the Digital Economy Act for targeting such unlicensed services as they appear on the scene. As previously reported, while the final Act does outline how such a system might work, it doesn’t actually make it law.
It’s reckoned Mulve may prove popular with those looking for free downloads simply because it’s not a P2P file-sharing platform, meaning use of it is less likely to be picked up by content owners who monitor the net for piracy. Which in turn means Mulve users are less likely to be targeted if and when the three-strikes warning letters go out.
That said, others point out that Mulve’s catalogue, while big, isn’t really any bigger than free streaming services like Spotify and We7, and some people use P2P file-sharing because you will always find content that the labels haven’t yet got around to (or just aren’t planning on) digitising that way.
Though given many file-sharers download mainstream content anyway, and many still prefer downloads over streams, there is probably a market there for Mulve to tap into, for as long as they can keep the record industry’s lawyers away from the door.
