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Sony's Grouper Picks On Searchles TV
pradeepe writes "Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine, a cease and desist letter over Grouper videos being streamed through Searchles TV, "the Internet's first video player that empowers users to mashup videos back-to-back with one player using multiple sources like MySpace, YouTube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Grouper." Grouper claims that Searchles has "effectively stripped away Grouper's extensive copyright protection system, including the 'Flag as Inappropriate' button and the link that appears on every single page of the Grouper website to allow copyright owners to report allegedly infringing material, in accordance with the terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act." It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."
Sony's Grouper, a video sharing site, has sent Searchles, a social search engine a cease and desist letter ... It's interesting to note that Grouper itself is being sued for copyright infringement."
Knowing Sony, Grouper's probably being sued by Columbia.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
If Searchles thinks they're doing a legal thing, they should sue Sony/Grouper.
If Searchles thinks they're doing an illegal thing, they should stop.
This is really a non-story.
Here we go again. Technology HAS CHANGED the world of entertainment and distribution. While companies grapple to figure out how to make money in the new world they find themselves embroiled in, there will be these (laughable) situations where litigation is a bandage on the gaping wound their business is suffering.
This demonstrates that not only have things changed, but incumbent businesses have no clue how to deal with the changes. There are, of course, notable exceptions. By way of exception I might mention that though they are not perfect Google, Apple, Linux community et al, IBM, Sun, and a few others are active in the new business paradigm. By definition they seem to be leading when in fact they are simply trying to stay alive and relevant. The previous generation of entertainment and media businesses were built slowly as technology previously evolved slowly, not so much anymore.
There will be more situations like this but the only way to make sense of it is if the world, not just the US or EU, begins to listen to technology experts, consumers, and visionaries that do NOT work in Redmond.
The entertainment industry is going to have to learn to live on what they can get up front, and stop demanding they get so much up front. Google and others have already figured out how to steal their ad revenue while they were busy trying to not change with the times and technology.
This particular issue will resolve itself, and set examples. That is good for one simple reason: there currently are not enough relevant examples of how to do business. One company has a good plan, then another comes along with a mash-up thingy and now the first company has to complain because they are not getting the revenue. Its all about business, and more importantly about the inability of many businesses to think beyond where they are now; their inability to innovate and change with the times.
No, I'm not a billion dollar inventor or anything, but spotting trends doesn't require a billion dollar bank account.
LESSON: When you set up an Internet business, try to make sure that you are ready to make deals with other people so that your revenue doesn't dry up like a spit of water in the desert.
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Awesome I can finally view all those Inappropriately Flagged videos. Hi Five!
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
This will be watched closely. Deep linking and framing are similar to the case. So far, deep linking itself has been held legal, but implying association in extensive deep linking is not. Given how well-stripped Grouper's videos are on Searchles, Grouper might have a chance.
-- Stanislav Shalunov
"Sony's Searchles Steals Content from Grouper"
And the summary would contain a link to Grouper, but not Searchles.
Telling.
You are on the money. I agree with all you have said, except the "stealing." Google and others with "eyes wide open" have seen the new paradigm in distribution and advertising revenue and have figure out multiple ways to capitalize on it. And yes, those that are making deals will survive in some shape or form.
Anyone seen my jagged little pill?
But I was shocked to find how true it was for me. I seriously considered for a moment, and yes, if Sony was doing this to, say, YouTube, I'd probably see it as stealing. Not horrible, not a rootkit, but still kind of a bad thing to do.
Whereas my initial reaction to this piece was more of the kind of "Sony needs to wake up to the realities of the Internet, and if it's not legal to do this, it should be."
I think Searchles is probably pretty cool, but I also think that this is going to end up being a bit like several Linux tools -- for instance, ies4linux. While it's not likely to be an issue for most people, it's probably illegal for them to redistribute IE, and it's certainly not legal to have a copy of IE without a Windows license. However, they probably have avoided trouble because they're so small, they warn you that it might be illegal, and they do it with deep linking, not mirroring -- you actually are downloading IE from Microsoft's website.
Besides: What copy protection, anyway? Sending an unencrypted flash video to a proprietary browser plugin is worse than DVD CSS, and that's saying something!
Moral of the story? I suppose I won't shed any tears for Sony anyway. Sony can do no right, and Google can do no wrong -- but they earned these reputations, and they continually reinforce them. Compare that to, say, desktop Linux, where there are actually far fewer jokes about recompiling your kernel, as people start to realize that it's unlikely you'll have to compile anything while using Linux, ever, unless you want to -- it certainly earned its reputation as a geek operating system, but it's now working to correct that.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
umm, Google charges per click, Amazon pays per sale, spammers charge per sale usually, therefore these MBAs running these schemes aren't actually as dumb as you seem to think they are.
And you act like they have no right to sell exposure to your eyes. "Selling your time which they don't own." You're enjoying content that you know is paid for. You're making a bit of a transaction there. It may not be UCC consideration, but you gain and you give up a bit of room for an ad. and adblock aside, every single slashdot user does in fact read ads, many of these stories are, in fact, advertisements and even the content that didn't arrive via payment to slashdot editors or slashdot itself probably got into the media via a media consultant.
You cannot avoid the fact that information is managed. I'm not making a moral claim, it's just the way of the world. The internet is a major medium for information, so the market for managing it will not dry up. The bubble was largely due to the fact that Clinton's US Attorneys were not prosecuting accounting fraud (not a political statement, but its true). Crappy business practices led to instability in speculative markets like dotcoms in the late nineties.
But Google and other serious internet advertising firms are not selling pagehits, they are selling clickthroughs. So you don't have to worry.
Sony can't claim copyright infringement on content they don't own, and if they did, they'd probably lose their safe harbor protection. Their letter makes it quite clear that they're aware of this, and simply warns that Grouper is probably violating the DMCA, rather than violating Sony's copyright. Then adds a bit of weaselling over trademarks, and makes a few suggestions over unfair competition.
Sony might actually have a point, but this is mostly sabre rattling.