Grokster, which distributes one of the more popular Internet file sharing programs, plans this week to start Grokster Radio, an Internet radio service powered by Mercora. Mercora was formed by Srivats Sampath, who founded McAfee and was at one time the anti-virus company’s president and CEO.

Mercora is a small application, which you download and install on your computer. It scans your hard drive, looks for all sorts of music files - MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA - and builds a tiny database. Then you send invites to your pals, inviting them to join your buddy list. Once they join your buddy list, they can listen and control a special playlist that you create for them.

Existing Internet radio stations stream songs and programming over the Web to individual computers. Mercora’s technology also streams music but works more like a file sharing or peer-to-peer program similar to the original Napster because its users can search for songs stored on other computers connected to the Internet.

Grokster+Mercora Net Radio
Mercora users can hear a song streamed directly from the owner’s computer, but they can’t download a digital copy of the song to their own computers.

P2P radio provides a way of sharing songs with a much-reduced opportunity for copyright infringement. Music fans get to play stuff they like to other music fans, and the music industry gets an opportunity to gauge what’s hot and what’s not - without the risk of losing too much income. Artists get paid a royalty, albeit a very small one, Mercora monitors the streamed songs and pays royalty fees to various music publishing and recording rights organizations. The company pays the same rates set by the government for Web radio stations.

Mercora has signed up about 200,000 users since releasing a beta version of its software in June, and those members are sharing about 10 million song tracks. More than 8 million copies of the Grokster program have been installed on computers around the world since it was introduced four years ago and is almost as notorious for its ‘piggybacked spyware’ as it is for its file sharing capabilities. Mercora claims to be spyware and adware free.

Read More:SFGate.com
Press Release [BusinessWire.com]

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Grokster Touts ‘Legal Licensed’ P2P Music Share System [the Register]
Grokster Teams With P2P Radio [CNet News]
Can IM Morph into Instant Music? [CNet News]
Grokster Wins Big in 9th Circuit [Corante.com]
Former McAfee CEO Takes on P2P [Wired News]
Pest Encyclopedia-Grokster [PestControl.com]
Beyond Filesharing:P2P Radio Arrives [TechNewsWorld]
MGM vs. Grokster [EFF.org]
Grokster Forum [Zeropaid.com]
P2P Radio Streaming [SourceForge]
Peercast [Peercast.org]
Internet Radio the P2P Way [OpenP2P.com]
Here Comes P2P Radio [Gigaom.com]