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Grooveshark Shuts Down
An anonymous reader writes: Grooveshark, one of the most popular music streaming websites, has announced that they are shutting down immediately. Several lawsuits from the record companies pushed the company out of business. In a notice posted on the Grooveshark website, its two founders said, "[D]espite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation." All of their music has been deleted, and the site itself now belongs to the record companies.
NewYorkCountryLawyer adds that according to the settlement (PDF), Grooveshark must pay $50 million, but no money judgment has been entered against individual defendants.
Despite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
Huh? Surely it can't be best of intentions if you publish music on your service for which you know you don't have proper licenses.
We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
But you still continued? Good plan there.
Except without all that silly permanence when things go wrong.
As long as the founders played the corporation game right, they have no personal liability at stake. A corporation is just like a person, except that when a corporation violates a law which would burden it for life, or financially destroy it, it magically disintegrates leaving the real people who ran it into the ground clean and unencumbered by their wrongdoing.
There are good reasons for the existence of corporations; this isn't one of them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
They didn't quite get to 'just walk away'. They were given a choice, an impossibly high fine to pay or hand over all their patents, copyrights, infrastructure, software, basically everything while very publicly scraping the ground about how wrong what they did was.
Essentially, they had something of value that was interesting to the plaintiffs that was bigger than their realistic chances at getting actual money out of them.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Why do people think all this music is Free?
Sure, musicians are being screwed over by the labels and publishers, but that's not a reason to outright steal it and deny the musicians the meager cash they are getting paid.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
if the music companies were smart, they'd continue to operate the site
"we shut down the pirates! that will end this threat once and for all!"
(two weeks later, 20 more sites)
it should have been:
"this is a popular site. now that we own it we will modify it slightly so that we derive some revenue from it while not pissing off the listeners, thus gracefully transitioning to a new distribution model that listeners desire"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Why do people think all this music is Free?
Might I remind you that our app stores are slam full of Free apps, which is the price that the users today demanded.
You know, apps like Pandora...that users can download and install without charge and listen to thousands of hours of music.
I'd say it's pretty fucking obvious why users think music is free. The industry is presenting it that way.
a. Because we payed for the music already when we bought vinyl/cd/bluerays
b. Because digitizing of soundwaves that reach my ear, should not be illegal.
c. Because anything that can be digitally reproduced, should not be artificially limited by law, its the road to "intellect" can be "property" which is the road to thinkpolice.
Take your pick, and go to live events, pay for those. Abolish copyright, it is IMHO a road to nowhere.
The patent system is actually there to let other people copy your design, but adds a grace period where you can be paid back for your effort in working on an idea, usually through making sure you are first to implement that idea. It is merely supposed to be a provision to encourage you to share an idea which you might otherwise hide while you sought to benefit from it. It is not supposed to "protect" your "property".
It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent. Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners". The patent period is a bribe so that the information is more effectively spread and not hidden.
If a patent is turned from a vehicle which is supposed to encourage the spread of ideas into simply a government sponsored industry, which counter intuitively tries to make it harder to spread ideas, it goes against the original reason for patents.
Copyright has a similar premise, and is going the same way. Mickey Mouse or a Metallica album is supposed to be protected only long enough to make it worthwhile for the artist to profit from its creation. That isn't supposed to be a guarantee that they get to drive a Bentley at the end of it or that you'll be able to have an industry based on the limitation of ideas.
What is actually happening is that the copyright and patents are being used to make it worthwhile not for the artist to make their music or the inventor to profit from their invention, it's being used to make it possible for publishing companies and patent-holding organizations to profit from the works of those artists. That's why copyrights are getting extended all the time.
Ease in which music or ideas can be copied should be a hint that these are not a solid basis for an industry. And the extremes to which these industries go to in order to halt the natural spread of performances and ideas only proves that point.
As someone who works in software, I think we have actually solved this issue very simply. Open source software makes money and provides a living to people who work with it every day. The ease in which that software can be copied has only made it more popular and the people who have created it even more in demand.