The music-streaming site Grooveshark was unceremoniously yanked offline in April, following a devastating 2014 court ruling that held its founders responsible for copyright infringement. Grooveshark management apologized "without reservation" for launching their site without proper licenses.

Many of Grooveshark's power users lost not only their go-to source for music streaming, but also carefully cultivated playlists of their favorite music. Those playlists, saved on Grooveshark, were likely handed over to the record labels who sued it, along with the rest of the site.

Now a group of Israeli techies say they've salvaged nearly all of the rogue website's database—something that will be a huge relief to diehard Grooveshark fans. What's more, they've built their own Grooveshark-like streaming service, on a website called StreamSquid—and cofounder Ofir Yosef says it's perfectly legal.

"From day one, we decided that we are going legit, one hundred percent," Yosef told Ars in an interview about his site. "We're not even remotely looking at what Grooveshark used as a business model."

StreamSquid doesn't allow uploads of MP3s like Grooveshark did. Instead, it asks users what songs they're interested in, asks for their playlists, and offers lists of top hits like the Billboard Top 100. Then it links to authorized versions of those tracks on YouTube or Soundcloud.

Anonymous sources

The sudden shutdown caused real pain for people who had lovingly built playlists of music they truly cared about, including Yosef and his two cofounders.

"People just lost their music," said Yosef. "We saw so many tweets. It was so devastating for people to lose their music in a single moment. The pain was real, and we felt the same way."

Yosef and three friends had already been working on StreamSquid as a kind of hobby. If his team would be able to find the playlists, it would be a major service to former Grooveshark users.

That's exactly what they were able to do. Yosef estimates that his team was able to find about 90 percent of the Grooveshark database of playlists, although he can't know for sure.

Grooveshark had 20 million users, and Yosef is cagey about how he and his friends got the massive store of their playlists.

"We got to know three or four persons that had collected this data," he said. "Although it is legal, they prefer to remain anonymous."

He did say that one source was a student who decided to get the Grooveshark playlist data. "He decided to do it as a data-mining project, just to play around with it," said Yosef. The StreamSquid team found the student had about 20 percent of the Grooveshark database.

I asked Yosef if any of the sources used to work for Grooveshark. "As far as I know, the answer is no," he said.

Yosef says the most gratifying part of his project comes when people realize their music collection—really just a list—isn't gone.

"I get replies [on Twitter] saying, oh my God, you just saved me," he said. "This is the response I want."

100% legit?

It's one thing to help hardcore Grooveshark enthusiasts reclaim their vast playlists, but it's another to build a successful product in the increasingly competitive music-streaming business. Yosef and his co-developers aren't quitting their day jobs (and they all have them.)

For now, StreamSquid is trying to gain an edge on services like Spotify and Rdio by not requiring any registration, making the site super easy to use.

"If you're a regular user, you can do it without giving us your name," he said. "The big names are all about data. We do it for a love of music."

Most of the top hits on StreamSquid appear to link to licensed YouTube clips uploaded by rightsholders, and streaming those would appear to be on solid ground legally. Still, record labels have objected to such uses of YouTube in the recent past. A Chrome extension called Streamus that streamed YouTube songs recently had to make major changes to its UI due to objections from YouTube—and Universal Music Group still blacklisted the software, stopping it from playing UMG-owned clips.

Searching for a few of my own albums through StreamSquid's back catalog, I found both songs that linked to official licensed videos, as well as user-generated versions of the songs.

Copyright owners often choose to leave such content on the site, since YouTube allows them to monetize the clips by slapping ads on them rather than insisting on takedowns. But there's no telling what they will make of the ad-free StreamSquid. If the site started to make real revenue—or even get serious attention—from playing unlicensed YouTube clips, record label lawyers might have a very different interpretation of its legal status. The RIAA declined to comment for this story.

"Maybe it will grow to be a big company one day and be huge," mused Yosef. "For now, our only goal is to provide people their music back."