Aurous, the Popcorn Time of music, is already being sued

The legal implications are muddy at best – but the app’s developer Andrew Sampson claimed that Aurous was above board, at least in the United States, because it used public APIs to find tracks on services like Soundcloud, YouTube and Spotify.

That, of course, hasn’t stopped the recording Industry Assoiciation of America (RIAA) from filing a lawsuit however, on the grounds that the service pulls in music from illegal BitTorrent sources.

While Amoeba Music is busy trying to open up a marijuana dispensary on the premises of their Berkeley location in order to boost sales, the internet is now abuzz about a new piece of software called Aurous, which people are saying might be the Popcorn Time of music. Only these links are hosted by the service.

In an interview with Billboard, Aurous said it was not involved in the traditional form of file-sharing, but instead is building a database of links to legal content. It does use the BitTorrent protocol for distribution, as it saves bandwidth for users by providing a direct connection to files. What stands out is that it can take advantage of other existing platforms and piggyback off those.

In addition to its unbeatable price of zero dollars a month, Aurous offers a lot of features that should be attractive to avid music fans, including the ability to import playlists built in other services and easily access the music they already have stored on their hard drives.

“Skip, shuffle and listen to music as much as you want”. I’d refer to it as a player of players.

So even if the legalities are not as straightforward as the RIAA says, there is still enough ambiguity to make this business plan tricky.

“[Aurous] is neither licensed nor legal”.

“We will not allow such a service to willfully trample the rights of music creators”.

Sampson has responded to the RIAA lawsuit on Twitter, calling the suit “empty” and vowing to fight it.