Domain: goear.com
Registration: Goear BV, Amsterdam, NL
Hosting Provider: Serverius Holding B.V. (Netherlands)
Registrar: Hosting Concepts B.V.
Revenue Sources: Advertising
Goear is an unlicensed streaming website hosted from Holland by Serverious Holding. The site offers hundreds of thousands of music files for users to stream and download. Currently the site has more than 450,000 files available (approx. 50,000 more than last year). The site is very important for both Spanish and Latin American users, but even more so for Latin America in 2015 following the closure of Grooveshark in May 2015. According to Alexa, the site has a global ranking of 33,852 and ranks 3,744 in Spain, (16.9% of the visitors to the site are in Spain). The site receives in excess of 50,000 unique users per day.
Many of the pages on the site display advertising banners which generate revenue for the site. Goear also uses social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. Previously an Android app for the site was available on the Google Play store but this was removed on referral to Google. However, the iOS app remains available on the Apple store.
To use the website, a user simply needs to type in the artist or album name they want to listen to in the search box following which they are redirected to a page from where they can stream the track. Rights holders have submitted take down requests but any action taken is ineffective and slow.
As with Bajui, in 2012 the Spanish music industry submitted a complaint to the IPC regarding this site. In 2013, the IPC held that the site had infringed the intellectual property in 10 albums. Goear’s lawyer filed an appeal at the National High Court regarding the IPC’s decision to end the administrative procedure. The National High Court dismissed the appeal and the Supreme Court has recently disqualified this case. In parallel, in March 2014, the Central Administrative Court issued a decision refusing to allow the ISP for the website Goear.com to suspend its service to the site. The judge held that such disruption to the site was not proportionate as the IPC had only demonstrated that 34 out of the 6,833 files were still on the site following the previous administrative decision. AGEDI subsequently appealed the decision before the Appeal Central Court of Administrative Litigation and the appeal was upheld. In January 2015, the Madrid High court found that the site was liable for direct copyright infringements and that it could not benefit from safe harbour protection under the E-Commerce law.
On 7 September 2015, the IPC requested that the site remove approximately 100,000 URLs. The site has posted the letter they received to their site. In the event of non-compliance with the removal order, the relevant internet service providers will be required to suspend access to the site.