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Josh Greenberg Death Comes After Long Line Of Grooveshark Legal Drama

Josh Greenberg, the chief technology officer behind the collapsed music service Grooveshark, was recently found dead in his home.  He was 28 years old.

Greenberg was highly regarded for his leadership abilities, contributions to startups, as well as his role in building the incredibly popular Grooveshark music service.  Greenberg was a co-founder of Grooveshark, which was shut down earlier this year due to a copyright infringement lawsuit.

His death comes after a sequence of events that have occurred over the past few months involving Grooveshark.

Grooveshark’s shutdown was accompanied with a message to their users that admitted wrongdoing for not acquiring licenses for the music they were making available to the public.

We started out nearly ten years ago with the goal of helping fans share and discover music. but despite the best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.

That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation.

The message is still publicly displayed.

Business Insider reported that if Grooveshark hadn’t shut down the service, they would have been forced to pay as much as $736 million in the lawsuit against them.

Days after the website was removed, new Grooveshark clones surfaced on alternative domain names. According to The Verge, the first of a series of clones was launched on May 5 at the web address Grooveshark.io.  The creator of the new website claimed to be a former employee of Grooveshark who had backed up most of the service prior to its termination.

The comeback obviously angered some people after all the effort that was put in to shut the music streaming website down.

U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan then ordered internet company CloudFlare to cease providing services to the Grooveshark clones.  CloudFlare reluctantly complied, but commented in an interview with Reuters stating that they are [inappropriately] being forced to act as “police” for copyright and trademark issues.

The order (..) “makes CloudFlare and other Internet Service Providers the copyright and trademark police for other rights holders,” the company’s general counsel, Kenneth Carter, said in an interview.

It has not been confirmed who was behind the Grooveshark clones, though most of the copycats have been shut down.

Josh Greenberg’s death comes only months after the official Grooveshark website was shut down.  Friends and associates of Greenberg have been expressing their gratefulness to having known him, and have been detailing all the contributions the man had made to the world.

According to the Gainesville Police, there was no evidence to suggest murder or suicide in Greenberg’s death.

Strangely, in a police report, both Greenberg’s mother and girlfriend stated that Greenberg was in good health, leaving many bewildered to the cause of death.

In a response to The Gainesville Sun‘s report regarding Greenberg, one commentator named Daniel Gage wrote, “When the world loses a creator, the whole world is poorer for it. A great legacy for one so young, gone too soon. RIP”

The sentiments are shared by many.

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