With the take down of Megaupload and the UK High Court finding The Pirate Bay of being guilty of facilitating access to copyright materials in the news for the past little while we get to add this news out of Denmark with yet another legal decision to block a web site at the ISP level.
Posted today at the excellent TorrentFreak site is the news that 30 rightsholders in Denmark have won their case that was directed at getting music streaming site Grooveshark; which accused the web service of infringing record label copyrights. As part of the court’s decision the rightsholders have been granted an injunction that will force an ISP to block Grooveshark.
Last year the Denmark based group of 30 entertainments, known collectively as RettighedsAlliancen, filed papers with the Danish Bailiff Court to all Danish ISPs block the US-based company Grooveshark. The argument being that Grooveshark had no content licences, or agreements, with the group members and also accused Grooveshark at being totally uncooperative in negotiations as well as making it incredible hard to take down offending material.
While the first ISP that was the ‘random target’ of the legal action argued that not all content on Grooveshark was offending, in fact it had been made available on the service by the artists or record company themselves, the courts decided otherwise.
However, the court said that even though certain aspects of the Grooveshark service may be considered legal, the extent of the copyright violations being committed using the service overwhelmed them.
The Bailiff Court said that ’3? was unlikely to suffer any financial losses as the result of an injunction and since ’3? customers are violating copyright law when they stream music from Grooveshark, they would not be able to claim compensation from ’3? when they could no longer access the site.
While I have used Grooveshark myself in the past and found it to be a passably good service the idea of blocking the company from Denmark at the ISP level is just plain ridiculous. It won’t do a single thing to stop people who are already downloading copyrighted music illegally – they will keep on doing so – and it is also taking away another viable way for artist to get their music into the market place.
Just plain stupid.
