Warner Music Slaps Songbeat With Lawsuit
February 05, 2009 at 09:14 AM EST
Who didn't see this one coming? When we first reviewed Songbeat , a simple desktop application for playing and discovering music on the net, we liked the product but were interested in what the music industry would have to say about it. The updated version released last December was even better, but we were still critical of its chances for survival. Songbeat essentially allows you to scour the web for MP3s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them. You can find and listen to as many music tracks as you wish, but you can only download 25 of them. An upgrade would cost you 19.99 Euros (or $ 29.9), for which you’d get an unlimited amount of downloads. When we checked with the German company behind the application about possible copyright infringement at the time, their response was: The downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand. The music labels didn't agree, obviously.