Music industry sues ‘Popcorn Time for music’

Copyright organization RIAA, on behalf of record companies Sony, Universal and Warner, has sued the maker of Aurous, a desktop application that can be described as the ‘Popcorn Time for music’. The organization is seeking $3 million in damages.

Aurous, an application for Windows, OS X and Linux, came out on Saturday. “The service is a blatant example of copyright infringement on a massive scale,” the RIAA said in its indictment. In the appendix to the indictment, twenty different music tracks are mentioned, on which the amount of 3 million dollars is based. However, that attachment does not appear to be online, so it is not known which numbers they are. In addition, the parties want the court to issue an injunction prohibiting third parties such as advertisers and domain name registrars from doing business with the company behind Aurous until a verdict is reached.

Aurous is a creation of Andrew Sampson, an American from Florida. Unlike Popcorn Time, Aurous does not use BitTorrent networks to fetch its content. Instead, music files are obtained from the Russian Prostopleer, VKontakte or MP3WithMe. Aurous is therefore a bundling of APIs from various websites that users can also use outside the application. Sampson doesn’t seem like himself pressure to make the indictment. It is not yet known when a judge will hear the case.