I don't know much about law and I'm not qualified to speak on behalf of Grooveshark. Having said that, I interned as a developer for the company for over a year. During that time I got to know its true culture and learned a a bit how it operates.
All of the folks I worked with saw it as their mission to support both independent music and independent software development. Everyone in the office brainstormed ways to help broaden their fan bases. (For example, giving artists Flattr accounts & letting them live-broadcast their music as they chatted with fans.) At the same time, many of the Grooveshark engineers I know contributed to open-source projects in their free time.
The API has never allowed users to download songs, and it seems clear to me (by browsing the comments in the code on Github) that one element of the project in question performed that function. That seems to be the crux of this problem.
Again, I'm not qualified to speak on behalf of Grooveshark, but I know from experience that its engineers are extremely supportive of these kind of open-source projects.
groovr.getSongFile songs[0].SongID, (err, file) ->
###
file.url is an mp3 url you can download
the file object also contains some meta info like song length
###
That indeed confirms what the Grooveshark developer was saying on the DCMA notice comments. Even though the API doesn't provide the MP3 file directly, it's trivial to get it through this function call.
All of the folks I worked with saw it as their mission to support both independent music and independent software development. Everyone in the office brainstormed ways to help broaden their fan bases. (For example, giving artists Flattr accounts & letting them live-broadcast their music as they chatted with fans.) At the same time, many of the Grooveshark engineers I know contributed to open-source projects in their free time.
The API has never allowed users to download songs, and it seems clear to me (by browsing the comments in the code on Github) that one element of the project in question performed that function. That seems to be the crux of this problem.
Again, I'm not qualified to speak on behalf of Grooveshark, but I know from experience that its engineers are extremely supportive of these kind of open-source projects.