A French music website that provides registered users with access to music streams is facing the wrath of Universal Music, mainly because it is seemingly operating without a licence, which is a great way to incur the wrath of a major record company, if that's what you're trying to do.
The website is called Deezer.com, and is basically a relaunched version of Blogmusik.net, another music website that was forced to close earlier this year because of similar legal pressure from the music industry. The new service is licenced on the publishing side of things (via French royalty types SACEM) but is still to do a deal on the recordings side, hence Universal's wrath.
When Universal announced that it was considering legal action against the popular Deezer.com service, the company's co-founder Jonathan Benassaya seemed relatively calm, claiming that the service was legal, or at least would be legal soon (which makes it currently 'illegal' me thinks). He then made an impassioned plea to the major, arguing: "We are not robbers. We want to pay for the rights to our music but it takes time to put all the agreements in place".
Universal have possibly chosen now to get all wrathy because it has reportedly transpired that it is quite easy to hack Deezer's streams so to actually download the music being played (ie allowing users to get a permanent copy of the music - which is possibly why the service is so popular!). On that, Benassay continued: "It appears there are some leaks in the website security and we have been working on that since Friday. This week by Tuesday or Wednesday we will put in place new security so you cannot download music".
As of this morning Deezer.com has been down for 24 hours with a holding page saying the website is undergoing maintenance. Whether that is to allow the security flaws to be fixed or is, in fact, a reaction to Universal's threat of legal action, we don't know.