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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.
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YouTube responds to takedown requests thus helping it stay within the safe harbor provision of the DMCA. The emails from Grooveshark do seem to suggest they activly participated in infringement rather than just being a medium which infringers happened to use.
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Why did I have to google the name to figure out WTF Grooveshark was?
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... you can't afford to do anything that will give them a knockout blow.
How would things have turned out differently if the founders of Grooveshark had started off the way they started off - with some illegal uploading and other things - but instead of "carrying on" they closed down their operation then started a whole new "legally clean" one and make 100% certain that neither they nor their officers or employees ever did anything that would give the opposition any ammunition other than, of course, providing a neutral platform for end users to use their services.
Yes, the opposition could claim "willful blindness" regarding what their customers were doing but their lawyers could reasonably counter-claim that the DMCA specifically allows or even requires hosting providers to be "willfully blind" to infringement unless they receive a specific notification of a specific violation. Thanks to the "dirty hands" of the officers and management, the company will probably never get a judge to rule on that part of the case.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Only copyrighted music. Or copyrighted anything else to which you don't have distribution rights.
If the copyright cartel had their way, any piece of technology which could possibly be used for things they don't approve of would be illegal.
They've been trying very hard to get that for years. If they keep bribing the right people, they might eventually get it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
They get their music by having their customers upload it.
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.
First a disclaimer, I don't feel like reading everything TFA links. Perhaps there is something incriminating in the details, but at least what the summary states is hardly illegal.
"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.
I don't see any statement about stealing MP3s to share, ignoring copyright claims by artists, or copying personally purchased music into the service. Those things would surely be illegal, and perhaps that is in the evidence somewhere and just didn't make the summary.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
You're assuming that sound recordings are treated in the same manner as other copyrighted works. They're not. Read up on pre-1972 sound recordings. They're covered by a messy patchwork of state laws, with the result that probably neither you nor I nor anyone here can know exactly how long those recordings are protected by copyright law.
Welcome to the wacky world of intellectual property.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
"mp3". The six copyright purist nerds in existance who might take such an instruction to mean you should do it while respecting copyright would have insisted on ogg vorbis or FLAC.
The whole intellectual property thing is government regulation and it is all outside of any kind of free market.
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perhaps that is in the evidence somewhere and just didn't make the summary.
Yes, there are some statements that ex-employees made:
The opinion also took note of the testimony of ex-Grooveshark employees who testified on behalf of the record companies. They explained how their bosses ordered them to acquire "the most popular and current songs" and upload them into the Grooveshark system.
As well as this:
"Escape openly acknowledged that their business plan was to exploit popular label content in order to grow their service and then 'beg forgiveness' from the plaintiffs and seek licenses," wrote Griesa.
So that coupled with the email seems to make it beyond reasonably doubt that the email was referring to downloading copyrighted music rather than looking for public domain music.