Victory against Grooveshark shows music industry has upper hand on sharing sites

The music industry has been waging a bitter campaign against song-sharing sites for years and now, for better or worse, the industry is clearly winning. The latest evidence of this came Monday when a New York court ruled that the executives behind Grooveshark, a user-driven streaming site, had violated copyright and destroyed evidence.

In a 57-page ruling (see below), U.S. District Judge Thomas Griesa found that Grooveshark’s founders had ordered employees to upload thousands of unlicensed songs in order to burnish the site’s popularity. He also concluded that the executives, over the course of litigation with the music industry, had deleted records of the uploads and some of Grooveshark’s source code in an apparent effort to cover up their activities.

The tone of the ruling is harsh and concludes with a so-called judgment as a matter of law in favor of nine record labels, including [company]UMG[/company] and [company]Sony[/company]. For practical purposes, it will likely lead to [company]Grooveshark[/company] being shuttered…