Details are finally beginning to emerge regarding last week’s arrest of an associate of Mulve, a music search application that gained notoriety earlier this year after being profiled by TorrentFreak.
The arrest by police in the UK prompted site operators to shut the service down for good despite having just brought it back online after a DMCA takedown the week prior.
According to the chief programmer of Mulve, who has requested to remain anonymous, his associate was detained by UK police, not about copyright issues, but for suspicion of “conspiracy to defraud.”
“I am the sole author of the program. John (not the associate’s real name) has never even seen the source code, neither does he know how to program,” the programmer told TorrentFreak . “The reason they went for John was because the domain was in his name for 1 day.”
Conspiracy to defraud is a fairly broad charge, and is also likely the only one that authorities could’ve used in this situation. A look closer look at Mulve’s business structure reveals a tough case to prove wrongdoing.
The application did not host files, but was actually an interface that helped users locate content on Russia’s Vkontakte social network. Operators reportedly never promoted the service for purposes that would infringe on copyrights, and also never saw the searches performed by users because they were all carried out on Vkontakte.
Despite the weak legal grounds, it is speculated that police carried out the arrest under pressure from both the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry and the British Phonographic Industry with the goal of shutting the service down for good. At this point, the Crown Prosecution Service will have to decide whether or not the case will reach the courts.
But while Mulve is gone, operators have released their source code and, predictably, two clones have already entered the scene.
Ironically, with the press that has been generated by the DMCA takedown and arrest, it’s quite likely that this is going to become a much larger issue for the record industries and authorities than if they’d left it all alone to begin with.
