That Didn’t Take Long: Aurous Sued by the Major Labels

As reported here earlier, Aurous, the new music industry piracy nightmare, went into public alpha recently, promising to offer free music for all and to ignore any and all cease and desist orders. Why? Because Aurous says they only provide a database of links to content, ranging from the legal (YouTube) to the illegal (shady torrent sites). Ergo, because it’s not hosting anything, Aurous maintains that they’re just a music player that floats on top of content that’s already out there.

This, predictably, isn’t the way the music industry looks at things. Just days after Aurous went online, the lawsuits started coming. The RIAA is now raining legal hellfire on Aurous, accusing the company and its founder of “willful and egregious copyright infringement.” It goes on:

The Aurous Network appears to consist of a single known pirate site based in Russia called Pleer (formerly known as Prostopleer).

Pleer has been the subject of repeated copyright complaints by rights holders to the Russian government. Its home page brazenly offers free unauthorized downloads of major recording artists’ top tracks for the week, year, and all time.

The RIAA considers Aurous to be nothing more than another Grooveshark, Limewire or Kazaa, three services that it successfully sued into the next dimension. Judgments against these sites were in the hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. It won’t help that an Aurous slogan is “Enjoy music how you want to for free.”

However Aurous wants to fight things, I can’t see how they’re anything but hooped. More details can be found here.