Hip-hop streaming and discovery platform Spinrilla is officially set to cease operating and pay the major labels $50 million following a years-long copyright infringement legal battle.
Judge Amy Totenberg just recently signed off on an offer of judgement from Atlanta-based Spinrilla, which the Big Three (corralled by the RIAA) first sued way back in early 2017. “A substantial amount of content uploaded to the Spinrilla website and apps consists of popular sound recordings whose copyrights are owned by” the majors, the original complaint stated.
Moreover, the defendants despite knowing as much had allowed “the infringing activity to continue unabated,” the filing parties maintained. Notwithstanding these firmly worded allegations and the better part of a decade that’s passed since the courtroom confrontation initiated, Spinrilla’s website was still operating at the time of this writing.
But it appears that will change sooner rather than later, for the aforementioned judgement (which entered the media spotlight in a report from TorrentFreak and arrived ahead of a planned trial) has permanently barred Spinrilla from operating “anywhere in the world.”
The judgement extends to the platform’s employees, execs, and even “any person or entity that hosts any servers through which the service” has functioned, covering Spinrilla itself and all “substantively similar” offerings. (Certain Spinrilla higher-ups have indicated on LinkedIn that their time with the company only ended this month, and it’s unclear exactly how the judgement will affect their other endeavors in the industry.)
Predictably, Spinrilla must also transfer its domain name to the majors, according to the legal document, which even outlines the steps that “any and all registrars and registries for the domain” will be required to take should the defendants fail to comply with the judgement.
Once again at the time of this writing, neither Spinrilla nor its founder looked to have commented publicly on the ruling or the involved $50 million payment. (Factoring based upon the number of allegedly infringed works, Spinrilla could have been made to pay as much as $612 million or so if the case had gone to trial.)
However, the seemingly popular service at present boasts 160,000 Facebook followers, almost 200,000 Twitter followers, and about 61,000 Instagram followers, besides some 342,000 App Store ratings and over 10 million Play Store downloads, according to the appropriate profiles and pages.
Towards 2022’s end, BMG, Concord, and Universal Music named Altice USA in a more than billion-dollar infringement suit, alleging that the New York City-based internet-service provider had “deliberately turned a blind eye to its subscribers’ infringement.” Separately, a 2024 trial date has been set in a copyright dispute between Epidemic Sound and Meta.