After several takedown requests, even more versions of my song appear on Grooveshark than before. That's why I applaud Universal's decision to take the digital music site to court

Universal is taking digital music service Grooveshark to court, and all I can say is: it's about time. I've criticised it in the past, but it wasn't until I tried to get my music off the site that I truly understood the anger that artists such as Robert Fripp feel towards it.

It started when I tried searching for songs I've cowritten. Amazingly, I found almost every song I've ever released – even songs in Swedish. Now, to clarify, Grooveshark does not have a licence to feature any of these songs, and they don't pay me anything. It's essentially a filesharing site, with users uploading music libraries to be streamed by other users. Much like YouTube, Grooveshark says its service is legal as they have a DMCA takedown procedure in place.

According to its instructions, I'd have to provide a "statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorised by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law". I also had to provide them with at minimum a URL to each work claimed to be infringing. "Note: Providing us with search terms such as 'Artist A' or 'Song B' will not be considered reasonably sufficient for us to locate the alleged infringing work. There may be 100 versions of 'Song B', and you may only have the rights to request a takedown for one of those versions." As the author of the track, I'd have that right for any version by any artist.

I decided to start with filing a takedown notice for one of my most popular tracks, as searching for, copying and pasting the URLs for all my tracks on the site would take hours. As it's a dance track, which has been included on many compilations and remixes, there were numerous versions of it on the site. After clicking on about 10 URLS to copy and paste into an email, the site suddenly said it didn't recognise the title when I searched for it. It was almost as if it had noticed that someone was going through each version of the track to prevent every URL to be accessed, but maybe I'm just being paranoid

Then I sent this polite but firm email to Grooveshark's copyright abuse department, giving them my STIM (the Swedish songwriters' collection society) registration number for the track, and stating that it didn't have the right to feature the track as it had no licensing deal with STIM nor with Universal Publishing, which handles my share of the publishing. Grooveshark politely replied it had now disabled the files and suggested I allow up to 24 hours before the changes became live.

Less than two days later I noticed there were twice as many links to the track in question, though none of them had the same URLs as the ones I'd copied and pasted into my email. So I sent a slightly firmer email, including around 15 URLs, clarifying I was unable to get all links as the site prevented me from doing so. "As you can see, rather than the track disappearing from your site, it seems to multiply," I wrote. "Again, I urge you to take down all versions of this track as you do not have permission to feature it on your site. I am a working musician and do not have time to spend an hour every day checking your site for versions of my track, copy every URL and then email you another letter including them – nor do I think it's right that I should have to, especially since it doesn't seem to make a dent in the amount of versions of my track on your site. It's difficult enough to make a living from music, without having to spend all this time checking for unauthorised use of my music on your site, as you clearly don't."

Grooveshark's "content coordinator", Rachel, replied again saying it had removed these new files, asking if I wanted to license my music with them. I prefer licensing my music to services that have the decency to ask first and where it actually matters if I say no, such as Spotify and We7. It's a basic requirement in any sort of negotiation.

Yet again even more files appeared on the site. I wrote again, and got the following answer: "The URLs you've submitted have been taken down promptly, though it appears your fans have reuploaded your songs as soon as we remove them. I've taken measures to revoke uploading privileges for those users identified. I've resubmitted the links in your last email for removal. Again this process will take 24 hours to kick into full effect. Best wishes!"

"My fans"? I somehow found their correspondence a bit patronising. It felt like Groundhog Day and by the sixth repeat of this procedure I'd lost some of my politeness:

"Dear Rachel,

I'm afraid your takedown procedure appears to be completely pointless. I've now emailed you several times with a multitude of links/URLs to the track. I keep getting the same response from you: that the track/links will be taken down within 24 hours. Yet every time I check the site there are even more links to it […] I'm also seriously doubting that 22 "fans" have uploaded the track within 14 hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning, but if that is indeed the case you obviously need to prevent people from doing so, as Grooveshark has no legal right to feature the track on its site."

The reply: "Helienne – I would be upset to [sic] and I agree that the rate at which your tracks have been reuploaded appears a bit odd. I'm looking into this. In the meantime I will continue to actively search for these [sic] this track for the next several days. My thinking is that if one or two people are responsible for the majority of these uploads they'll realise the uselessness of reuploading them. Please bare [sic] with us as we sort out this error. I sincerely apologise for the time you've lost aggregating these lists. Please allow me the next few days to resolve this problem entirely for you." (The fact that the email had the typo "these this track" suggests to me this was a standard reply.)

The track in question remained on the site andnow, two months after I contacted Grooveshark, there are at least 12 different links to it. (Out of curiosity, I did contact the "director of music strategy" regarding licensing, but I quickly learned they had no system in place for paying songwriters. Once they realised I'd discovered this they stopped replying).

So, when I read an anonymous comment on Digital Music News claiming that as a Grooveshark employee he/she was required to upload a predetermined amount of tracks every week, it made perfect sense. The post ended with: "There is no way in hell you can get your stuff down. They are already tagged since you sent in your first complaint. The administration knows you can't afford to sue for infringement." Grooveshark claims the comment is a fabrication. If Universal decides to subpoena DMN, we'll find out if that's true or not.

In the meantime, some eyebrow-raising emails have come to light. Grooveshark investor Sina Simantob, who is CEO of Highland Wealth Services and executive chairman of Escape Media, which operates Grooveshark, wrote: "We bet the company on the fact that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission."

Explaining how to avoid the kind of licensing negotiations services such as Spotify and We7 undertake, Simantob continued: "We use a label's songs until till we get 100m uniques, by which time we can tell the labels who is listening to their music, and then turn around and charge them for the very data we got from them, ensuring that what we may them [sic] in total for streaming is less than what they pay us for data-mining.

"Let's keep this quite [sic] for as long as we can," he added.

Doesn't sound much like the kind of "hippie college student" image Grooveshark has tried to portray since its launch.

It's possible that Rachel recognised my name, as I'd criticised the site in the past. If so, it's possible she answered me more politely and promptly than many others. Either way, we've all had the same result: nil. So why is it only major labels take companies such as Grooveshark to court? Does that mean most artists and songwriters are happy with how these sites behave? Not at all. It just means, as the anonymous comment above acknowledges, that Grooveshark knows we can't afford to sue for infringement.