Grooveshark may be gone officially, but a clone site bearing the same name has begun swimming the internet seas and offering downloads of music and films to users. The official rendition of the file-sharing site formally shut down last week after a lengthy legal battle with Universal Music.
The original Grooveshark claims to have wiped its servers, but apparently not fast enough for username "Shark" to back up more than 90 percent of it (according to the anonymous user), and hosting it on a site titled Grooveshark.io (the .io domain comes from the Indian Ocean territory...a popular generic domain thanks to its lack of actual government oversight).
The launcher of the new site spoke with The Verge, claiming they've got ambitious plans for the future.
"I have huge and unexpected plans for Grooveshark," Shark said via an e-mail interview. "And I promise you this is not even close to being its end."
That said, the site claims to respect intellectual property by reminding users that they're only legally-allowed to download something if they already own an original copy. Something that, you know, no music owner has a need for (except perhaps in the case of vinyl, which is tough to upload to a computer).
"Before you start downloading songs we want to tell you the following," warns the site. "The songs you want to download may have copyright(s) on them. This means you're not allowed to download the song if you don't possess the original record. We don't add MP3s manually, therefore we can't assure that songs are copyrighted or not."
Hint, from us to you: They probably are.
Although the closure of Grooveshark was hailed as a major victory for the music industry, the problem with sites harboring illegal content is that they rarely die forever. A similar situation is the notorious Pirate Bay file-sharing market, which-although having been shut down several times before-pops up again in new domains.
Let's see how long Grooveshark can keep swimming.
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