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Grooveshark Found Guilty of Massive Copyright Infringement
An anonymous reader writes: If you're a Grooveshark user, you should probably start backing up your collection. In a decision (PDF) released Monday, the United States District Court in Manhattan has found Grooveshark guilty of massive copyright infringement based on a preponderance of internal emails, statements from former top executives, direct evidence from internal logs, and willfully deleted files and source code. An email from Grooveshark's CTO in 2007 read, "Please share as much music as possible from outside the office, and leave your computers on whenever you can. This initial content is what will help to get our network started—it’s very important that we all help out! ... Download as many MP3’s as possible, and add them to the folders you’re sharing on Grooveshark. Some of us are setting up special 'seed points' to house tens or even hundreds of thousands of files, but we can’t do this alone." He also threatened employees who didn't contribute.
Clearly the management of Grooveshark didn't have the forethought of those at the IRS did to ensure that hard drives containing potentially incriminating emails disappear.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Why did I have to perform a search on Bing to figure out WTF "google" was?
When I worked at a video game company prior to the dot com bust, one of the QA supervisors kept pestering me to contribute to the internal MP3 server. So I did. I brought in my collection of Patsy Cline CDs, ripped on my workstation, and transferred to the MP3 server. My contribution to the communal music collection was deleted within five minutes and the supervisor stopped pestering me.
They did get sued... in 2007. Their response was to license and implement YouTube Content ID, which got Viacom and everyone else to drop their suits against YouTube.
BTW, any time Google says they can't do automated copyright filtering, keep in mind that they can... because they already do. And it's as terrible as they say it is. Some idiot with a CMS account uploads his "epic mix" of "music" consisting entirely of otherwise public-domain or royalty-free sound effects, and suddenly all of YouTube has to fill out disputes, appeals, and counter-notices which are mediated by the same kinds of low-level support employees that tell you to press the Start Menu and type "ipconfig" on your Linux box when you say your cable modem is broken. It's a bureaucratic nightmare.
Why did I perform a search on Yahoo!?
At all?
Because my Altavista bookmark is forwarding me there now. When did this happen?
Oh well, I guess I'll try that new "Hotbot".
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?