RIAA Settle Free Music Streaming Service for $3 Million

Aurous is definitively offline. The RIAA and the American makers of the streaming music service are said to have reached a settlement of 3 million dollars, converted 2.7 million euros. The service was active for about two months.

The news is apparent from documents that are in the hands of Torrentfreak. The music streaming client Aurous has also been described in the media as a ‘Popcorn Time for music’. The service used third-party APIs such as YouTube, SoundCloud, Prostopleer, VKontakte, and MP3WithMe to fetch its content. The software was officially released in October, and that same month, the company immediately caught the attention of the RIAA in the form of a lawsuit and injunction.

As part of the settlement, Aurous will pay the RIAA $3 million to pay for the attorneys and compensate for lost revenue from the record companies the RIAA represents. Torrentfreak, however, makes the comment that the two parties have reached an additional agreement outside the courtroom. It may contain a different amount and the 3 million dollars only serve to deter other parties. For example, it turned out that the settlement between the MPAA and Hotfile was not for $ 80 million but for $ 4 million. In addition to the amount of money, the developer must also hand over their domain names and intellectual property.

Aurous developer Andrew Simpson says he’d like to see Congress change copyright laws and regulations. For example, he states to Torrentfreak that “damage is suffered by rightholders, but that under the current legislation those parties do not even have to prove the damage.” In addition, he says there is “something wrong with a law that regularly confronts students and teens with excessive fines for activities the consequences of which they may not have fully understood.”