Digital Grooveshark Timeline Legal

Danish courts issue web-block injunction against Grooveshark

By | Published on Wednesday 22 February 2012

Grooveshark

Danish anti-piracy group RettighedsAlliancen has seemingly secured an injunction through the country’s courts ordering local internet service provider Three to block access to its customers to Grooveshark, the often controversial streaming music service which claims its legit, but which is currently facing legal action from all four majors.

As previously reported, the Danish rights body accused Grooveshark, which lets users upload music to its catalogue, of infringing copyright last November, and this week a court seems to have agreed with those claims. Three could as yet appeal, but if it doesn’t successfully other Danish ISPs are likely to be served with a similar injunction.

While web blocking injunctions against unlicensed content services are becoming common in some jurisdictions, and are in theory possible in the UK since last year’s Newzbin ruling, injunctions against a service like Grooveshark are possibly even more controversial in that some rights owners have licensed the platform, and its operators claim to be on the right side of copyright law because they operate a takedown system to remove unlicensed tracks if and when made aware of them.

That said, such a takedown system only really assures protection from infringement liability under US copyright law, and even there rights owners – who feel Grooveshark only pays lip service to its takedown obligations – are trying to show that a lot of the unlicensed content available on the streaming service is uploaded by staff not users, so the takedown system does not protect them from infringement claims.

Grooveshark is yet to respond to the reports of a web block being ordered against it in Denmark.



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