While Aurous hasn’t detailed too much how it manages to achieve this, the explanation is that it’s pulling music from a variety of third-party sources instead of negotiating with record labels and artists. Sampson has claimed that the service is legal because it doesn’t host any content and all the streams come from legitimate public sources. While this doesn’t sound as illegal as directly torrenting the music, this is still a questionably legal way to stream music. Aurous, on the other hand, uses the application programming interfaces (APIs) of other music services to deliver content to users.
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Aurous’ search engine helps ensure that users only see music for which they have legal access; unlicensed content such as bootlegs or pre-releases are removed once identified.
Aurous has also been criticised technically, with MusicAlly writing that “The music industry spends a lot of time thinking about how to make legal digital services “better than piracy”: well, if the hot new piracy thing is “worse than Spotify” that’s encouraging”. Just a few days after Aurous launched its free, torrent-based music streaming service and hours after it won widespread media coverage, the RIAA announced an aggressive lawsuit to bring it down.
Doesn’t matter now as the three majors, UMG, Sony Music and WMG (as well as subsidiaries Atlantic and Capitol) have filed sued against the app. “This service is a flagrant example of a business model powered by copyright theft on a massive scale,” industry watchdog RIAA said. “We will not allow such a service to wilfully trample the rights of music creators”.
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“The RIAA and its clients respectfully disagree, claiming that it serves music from piracy strongholds Pleer, MP3Skull, and MP3WithMe”. Now, a matter of days later, developer Andrew Sampson is already facing a lawsuit from the major labels. Unfortunately, looking at past similar projects, nearly all if not all of them have failed.
