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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.
Best I can do now is a shark that can slow dance. It's just not the same.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
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.
Who said they are getting to walk away with just an apology? Their statement includes:
Note the "as part of a settlement agreement ..." part - which indicates that shutting down operations isn't the end of it for them.
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.
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.
Stealing is the taking of property with the intention of depriving the owner of the use of said property.
Copying a piece of music is not stealing because it does not suddenly disappear from the hard drive of the musician or render the musician unable to perform it.