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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.
Anyone with some legal experience able to clarify this? Given that grooveshark wasn't...exactly...apologetic about their strategy(nor has it changed all that much), my assumption is that the sudden shift to grovelling-apology-mode has much more to do with losing than it does with any change of heart.
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
There is a class of people in america that see a corporation failing as being just as tragic (or not) as watching an individuals life get destroyed.
From their perspective, if you are poor, and have debts, allowing your debtors to kill you and claim your remains as their own to justify the cost of the bullets is entirely reasonable. After all people are corporations too!
We are all limited liability in that we only have so much you can take from us before we are "shut down" (dead) and have no more assets to provide (estate and next of kin are both also depleted, or dead)...
...because I spent 1.5 years of my life @ MP3.com running reports and collecting data as discovery for the lawsuits of record companies, publishers, individual artists, and whomever owned any percentage of any playback rights in any country (and yes this means people who owned less that 1% of a song's rights in Turkmenistan).
And as someone who has produced both software and music, I agree 100% with the parent on this. And I'm not posting AC :)
I get paid for what I produce, not for what other people experience/consume. This is the case for most developers of intellectual property. It's the next level up: the lawyers/distributors/vendors that require payment for distribution of intellectual property. A lot of their work would vanish if Congress made such a move, because their jobs are artificially created.
Anyone who actually produces intellectual property who would feel threatened by things becoming free needs to take a hard look at why they feel threatened. Do they feel like they are currently being paid more than what they develop is actually worth on an open market?