Grooveshark was formally closed down in May after settling with the RIAA, but the questionably legal streaming site stayed alive as a series of clones. Today the recording industry group won a successful case against the reincarnated Grooveshark site. A New York federal court granted the RIAA more than $13 million in piracy damanges and $4 million for willful counterfeiting. Not only did the RIAA win the damages, but it has also received ownership of the Grooveshark domain names to prevent their use for further infringements.
This is the second big case against upstart music services for the RIAA in the past week. The group also successfully shut down Aurous, a platform that tried to offer free music access by pulling from third-party sources rather than hosting files itself. That case settled for $3 million.