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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
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.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
... 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.
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.
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?
Because you are way out of the loop?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Most often overheard quote indie band quote " I can't eat exposure" .
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.