It was about a week ago when the news came through that music streaming service, Grooveshark, had placed their app back on the Play Store after months of absence due to copyright infringement claims. A few days after that, it was removed from the Play Store with no real word from Google as to the reasoning behind it.
I reached out to Grooveshark to see if I could get their side of the story — given that Google isn’t being very vocal on the issue.
“Grooveshark as an app is not a copyright infringement and Google should recognize through their experience with YouTube that our actual partner artists and labels are suffering every day our app is down. We have filed a counter-notice and are working with Google and their Google Play reinstatement process to get our app back in the market.”
There’s no saying if the counter-notice will even sort the issues out. Grooveshark’s app isn’t gone from the Android scene, however, you can still get it from their site as they pointed to us in their statement.
“Until then, our Android app remains available for all at http://mobile.grooveshark.com/android and we thank all the users who continue to support open music, open markets, and open internet.”
Ouch. Taking a dig at Google for not providing an “open internet” — perhaps clever, perhaps not. As far as Grooveshark are letting on, they do have legitimate agreements with the record labels to have artist’s music distributed in this way. NBC News are reporting that the main problem behind the app could be the fact that Grooveshark allow users to upload their own music.
What’s the problem with that? Well, just because it’s worded in a way that suggests users can upload their own original content, users can still go right ahead and upload any music they have sitting on their computers — regardless of their ownership rights.
With that in mind: will we ever see Grooveshark back on the Play Store? Probably not. At least not in its current form — they may have to restrict the playback of user-uploaded content, and I don’t think that would be in Grooveshark or its users best interests.
I’ve got a similar issue, google isn’t answering my attempts to get my app unblocked on the play store. my app used to be known as Telstra Usage, but due to trademark issues I had to change it to T Usage, but google are silent (telstra said they are happy with the change).