Tech

The Napster of streaming was immediately sued by the music industry

by Richard Howard

On October 10, a new player entered the music streaming service game. Its name is Aurous, and its main selling point is that it’s not for sale at all – it’s absolutely free. Unfortunately, it’s also probably illegal as hell.

The service, which claims to be “the world’s first Bit Torrent powered music player” (it’s actually been relying on external services like VK thus far) uses peer-to-peer file sharing to provide music streams to its users. In a clever bit of advertising, Aurous also referred to the app as the ‘Popcorn Time for Music’ due to the similar way the wildly popular TV and movie streaming program gathered its content. However, the feel of the program (minus the lack of a downloading aspect) feels a whole lot like the infamous Napster program and its clones. This is an opinion the music industry seems to share, since it took them only three days to sue the pants off the new app.

Yesterday, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a suit against Aurous which requests that the service be destroyed. In classic music industry overkill style, they further requested that the service be fined $150,000 for every instance of copyright infringement it contributes to (presumably every time a copyrighted song is streamed).

Of course, there was never any question this would happen – the only surprise (if any) is how quickly the RIAA acted. Aurous didn’t even pretend to attempt to secure any licensing deals – or have any plans to do so.

Speaking to Billboard, Aurous founder Andrew Sampson explained why the service remains on solid legal ground: “We’re not hosting anything, we’re decentralized, similar to BitTorrent, so we can share data without hosting it. Nothing goes through our servers.” Sounds eerily familiar to Shawn ‘Napster’ Fanning’s 2001 argument -which didn’t work out too well for him.

So far, things have looked a bit rocky all around for Aurous. User reviews are lukewarm, with complaints about a severely limited content library dominating feedback. While this may improve as the service begins to rely more on YouTube, Spotify and Bit Torrent as promised, as of today it looks like Aurous has bigger problems.