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Grooveshark Co-founder Josh Greenberg Dead At 28
alphadogg writes: The tech startup world has been shaken today by news that 28-year-old Josh Greenberg, co-founder of recently defunct music sharing service Grooveshark, was found dead on Sunday in the Florida apartment he shared with his girlfriend. No foul play is suspected, but the local medical examiner is conducting an autopsy, according to the Gainesville Sun. Grooveshark was shut down in April after the company was threatened with legal action and possibly hundreds of millions in damages by several big music labels.
His mother, Lori Greenberg, told the paper that her son was in good health and that police had found no visible injuries or signs of drug use. Moreover, the local police department confirmed in a tweet that there was no evidence of foul play or suicide.
We should be thinking of the family, especially his parents. My son also died at 28, one-third of a decade ago.
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Thank you; I always know exactly how long it's been; one-third of a decade plus three days today; or, if you prefer, 40 months and 3 days.
Josh may not be dead of fowl play, but the music industry... as in the artists are definitely dead.
The big labels are doing fine, with record album sales. However, their bands are the labels' constructs with musicians hired individually. They don't have A&R men that find a good band gigging at a night club and sign that band anymore. At best they are looking for someone good looking, and docile enough to sign what lyrics are put in front of them.
As for what put the artists out of business. Very simple: Streaming (virtually zero revenue), pay by the track (can't make money from 99 cents/track as you can with CD sales), and piracy (zero revenue.) There are far more bands than venues, and if you want to "gig" you have to rent the venue and pay those costs, as opposed to just hopping on stage and getting a cut of the door and bar as in the past.
So, the artists are hosed... but the music industry will happily making Justin Biebers, and the masses will obey and buy those songs.
A guy tries to run a startup, the startup has crushed for various reasons, then there is the question of lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars in supposed damages to music labels. No foul play...
Really? That's your approach to this? Yet another young guy trying to find a way to get rich by setting up a system built from the ground up to infringe on others' copyrights, and which gave laughable lip service to take-down notices (ripped off material that was removed re-appeared more or less instantly). Foul play? The foul play was on his part, and of course the chickens came home to roost, which is why he gave up on the scheme. Whether or how yet another failure of a Piracy-As-A-Service "start-up" might have contributed to his death remains to be seen.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
The actual overdose rates don't seem to support that on the surface, unless heroin is almost exclusively being used by healthy people, and cocaine is being used almost exclusively by physically frail individuals. http://www.drugabuse.gov/relat...
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
When things like "happy birthday" can still retain copyright, then I have zero respect for all copyright.
In his honor, I plan to launch a streaming burials site, where you can watch people being laid to rest 24/7. No, I will not pay any royalties to the families of the deceased.
I plan to call the site "GraveShark".
Oh no... it's the future.
it's like the death of aaaron swartz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
these fucking companies have a business model which depends upon an outdated understanding of how information is shared, then they utterly destroy the financial lives, or actually jail, young entrepreneurs who see the future. they could make deals with these guys and take over their companies for their "crimes", and benefit thataways
instead we have these pigheaded, shortsighted, cruel "punishments" for the crime of showing ignorant old fossils that their business models suck in the internet age
this is the worst of lawyers, corporations, and the legal status quo, and i hope these judges, lawyers, and corporate sycophants can sleep at night, because blood is on their hands
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And no one who still has their life wrote "Happy Birthday", so there. Copyright law is insane, and one way to try to change it is to ignore it with derision. Not saying it's the best way, just a way.
Somewhere a hipster is sad that you don't care.
No, it means he wants shit for free and doesn't care if artists or their heirs get paid.
Your fallacy is strong with this one. Creator-endorsed is a much more civil system - copyright isn't the only way to get paid. It may be one way to get paid more, but that gets paid for with lives of innocents (and no, profit reduced from a hypothetical does not make one a victim).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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And who gets to decide that someone has been "ripped off"? If instead of there being a privileged class of people "creating" things I like, there was more of an effort to make tools that make it easier to bring things into existence things people like, the world would be a far better place.
Personally, I send payment in cash directly to artists home address and bypass any middlemen for the cost of album.
Call it falacy if you want. I've written and sold software that made its way onto TPB and resulted directly in lost sales,
No doubt you got an F in high school economics.
In fact here's a little lesson: At my school, a student walked into the classroom saying that the soda machine was selling bottles (which were normally $1.50) for 5 cents. You know what happened? Basically the whole class went out to buy a soda. However if the price remained at $1.50, there wouldn't have been any increased sales; they would have simply done without.
This is a very basic economic concept called price elasticity. When something is free (aka your software) then the demand is much greater. However if the price is higher, then there's substantially less demand.
In simpler terms, if somebody didn't get your software for free, they would have simply gone without it anyways.
Now, that isn't to say that piracy doesn't negatively impact sales. It can, but not in the way you're thinking. Namely, one download isn't one lost sale. It's realistically much less than that, though how much less depends on the particular good.
For example, gasoline is something that is very inelastic. It pretty much doesn't matter how much it costs, people still tend to consume roughly the same amount of it, even when it goes up substantially.
However, in digital goods it tends to work more like this: The pirated copy may negatively impact the perceived value of a legitimate copy, but has virtually no negative impact on actual sales. Somebody might, for example, pirate a copy of your program, but then wait until it is offered at a discount before buying the real thing.
Now -- having said that -- a lot of software companies have taken advantage of this by offering special incentives for pirated users to go legit, and they usually do quite well with it. Although they made less than they would have if they had sold it at full price, they at least got some sales that they otherwise never would have had, so in the end it's a much more profitable proposition than had those users just done without entirely.
That's usually what an autopsy is for. It's already been announced that there wasn't any signs of foul play, obvious drug use, or known suicidal thoughts. Toxicology results usually take some time so unless the examiner finds something really quick and really obvious, they probably can't tell you yet how he died.
In simpler terms, if somebody didn't get your software for free, they would have simply gone without it anyways.
That would only be true if (a) no one ever bought software and (b) it was considered fair for all creators of digital works to give their time for free and absorb any other incidental expenses.
As it is, this software developer had no chance to try out the market for his work, as it is clearly impossible to compete on price with zero.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it