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It's hard for me to gather sympathy for an industry that fines people thousands of dollars per song.

http://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-years-later

"The organization also targeted a fully disabled widow and veteran for downloading over 500 songs she already owned. The veteran’s mobility was limited; by downloading the songs onto her computer, she was able to access the music in the room in which she primarily resides. The RIAA offered to settle for $2,000, but only if the veteran provided a wealth of private information regarding her disability and her finances"

If Grooveshark has found a legal loophole that will let this disabled widow listen to her music in comfort, which she already purchased once, more power to them. Sign me up for as many petitions as I can legally sign.

I'm really not sure of the difference between Grooveshark and Youtube. Youtube had tons of copyright violations in its early days. It still has tons of copyright violations. the difference is, Youtube is mature and big enough that record labels are finally trying to work with, rather than against it.

I'm sure Grooveshark responds to DMCA requests, and that's all they're obliged to do.

Youtube may have been slightly more tolerable to rightsholders because it generally hosted content that was materially inferior to the content consumers were buying from them; nobody used it as a substitute channel for commercial TV.

Sure they did. I have many friends who would play music through Youtube or watch music videos on there. A lot of them discovered new music on Youtube, then bought it off iTunes. Mind you, that's not an argument for piracy, it's an argument for the free, easy distribution of music.

I don't know what your comment has to do with my comment. My point is that Grooveshark is a closer substitute for the sanctioned product it overlaps with than Youtube was with the product it overlapped --- especially in the early days, when copyright was an issue for Youtube.

And I agree. I was just saying that people did, in fact, use youtube as a substitute for licensed distribution channels.

I'd have to agree with this also. It's called YOUtube for a reason, it was created for YOU to upload videos of YOUR content. If Grooveshark was called YOUshark or something in the beginning, and stated: Upload YOUR bands recordings and get exposure! This would be a different thing. Back when Grooveshark was starting out they could assume that James Taylor and U2 were not uploading their content to get exposure and could have deleted that manually at the beginning to try and enforce their point that it is unsigned content only. But that's not what they are going for.

Grooveshark is not equivalent to the Pirate Bay.

I use the service to stream music that is completely paid for and legal. Allowing other users to stream the music I uploaded seems to be no different in principle than playing it on a loudspeaker in a public space. Do I have the right to let other people listen to my music? This doesn't seem to be a copyright issue because no media has been actually copied. Grooveshark allows multiple users to listen to a single, legally owned copy. Grooveshark not only removes copyrighted material upon request, but also blocks uploading privileges for users who have violated the rules.

It is also not the case that they are acting selfishly and without regard for the industry. They are constantly taking steps to work with the major labels and have already closed a deal with EMI. Only Universal is suing them. They also have a profit sharing program with artists and do seem to care about finding new revenue streams for the music industry.

music being used is opt-out, revenue sharing is opt-in, that to me explains all about their ethos and how they run the service. It would not be at all difficult for them to go legitimate like Spotify with regards to technology and number of employees needed, but it would kill their business because they can't operate "legitimately" like Spotify, that's not their business model.

Also I would eat my hat if you have a license that allows you to redistribute music you "purchased", I'd be even more surprised if that license allowed you to grant streaming rights to a third party. The license terms for an itunes purchase are extremely limited.

You didn't reply to the main point of my post. Have you ever been to a bar that played music you don't own? Did the bar steal from the artist by letting you and others hear something you don't own? Should the DJ call the artist first to get permission?

Please explain why it is not incumbent upon the artist to request that someone stop playing a copy of their music in public. Or why - if no digital/physical copies are being distributed - the label should have the right to make such a request.

Also, Grooveshark is in fact operating "legitimately" according to EMI, all of their other partners and legal precedent. Is Universal's approval the arbiter of legitimacy?

You do understand that bars and venues pay site licenses to PROs like ASCAP and BMI, don't you? And DJs don't need permission thanks to compulsory licenses, but they are required to report all plays if they're on-air or spin records in a licensed venue.

As far as I know, the fees to ASCAP and BMI only cover performance rights, and have nothing to do with the record labels.

It's the fact that streaming digital audio consists of making multiple copies of the same bits that allows them to call it (recording) copyright infringement.

Correct. I was addressing the commenter saying that uploading them legally and streaming to many is no different than a bar. My whole point was that a bar licenses the music.

Purchasing music under a personal license doesn't allow one to broadcast or perform the work, so the justification is off.

And it's actually considered the same thing for web streaming — it doesn't have all that much to do with copies. By law webcasting falls under a performance so webcasters are on the hook for both publishing and performance royalties. (Radio gets a waiver on performance royalties and only pays publishing. So the composers get paid, but not necessarily the performers.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio#US_royalty_contr...

> Have you ever been to a bar that played music you don't own? Did the bar steal from the artist by letting you and others hear something you don't own? Should the DJ call the artist first to get permission?

Actually, yes. Bar do get sued when they haven't licensed the music properly, and I recall hearing of instances of them being sued successfully merely for having music played over the radio to a large audience, because it wasn't licensed correctly. Of course, it's only the large labels who actually have the resources to do this; bands would probably generally be okay with it (exposure, increasing the chance of people buying their records or going to their shows).

This is true, but I was referring primarily to the principle of whether someone has "stolen" by playing legally owned copyrighted media in public. Copyright laws have also forbidden public screenings for videos as well, and I think those laws are equally ridiculous. Come to think of it, I've also heard that Grooveshark has a live music program for DJs and venues.

> than playing it on a loudspeaker in a public space

Read the licence on your cd's. You're NOT allowed to do this without explicit permission.

Read again: I was arguing about the principle. I don't deny that there a ridiculous number of things the labels don't want you to do with your own property, like burning the disc. Copyright laws can be absurd in the extreme. In fact, I know of several economists who literally cannot quote their own works without getting permission from the publisher -- even if the book is out of print. The laws exist sure, but that doesn't make the actions they prohibit immoral or damaging.

Also, I wasn't talking about playing a CD: I was talking about streaming Grooveshark in public. This has different implications due to the DMCA.

> Read the licence on your cd's. You're NOT allowed to do this without explicit permission.

The courts didn't seem to think much of license stickers on CDs.

https://www.eff.org/press/archives/2011/01/04-0

That said, there are provisions in copyright law that govern public public performance that they can rely upon, without needing their license stickers to be valid.

Doing what Spotify did isn't that easy. They had years of lawyer negotiations before they got any label to sign up. They had to have some serious dough before they could even broadcast the first tune. And that's with the swedish STIM organization that pretty much lets you broadcast any music as long as you pay per listener.

Grooveshark is trying to build a business. To build a business on music you have to let people listen to music. Once they have working business-model (if they ever get there) they can get to paying the artists.

I agree it's somewhat twisted, but I think that's what is necessary.

So it's okay to abuse the law while building a business because it's "hard" to do it legitimately? You can't be serious? If it's too hard to do it legitimately, you don't do it. Spotify have proven it's possible to do so what on earth gives Grooveshark (or any company) the right to abuse the law and make money from things they don't have the rights to? I don't get it...

I must be misunderstanding your argument because that makes no sense on earth to me... couldn't the same lines be used to justify the BP problems ("when we have enough money we'll follow safety regulations") or even drugs ("when we have enough money we'll start a florist")? If you intentions to build a legitimate business at the end, who cares what you do on the way?

It's just the same old piracy arguments as always. Using a legal loophole is not the same as selling drugs or not follow safety regulations.

Grooveshark is not doing anything illegal even if they might be "abusing the law".

The fact remains that people want to consume music in a way that the music industry does not allow.

If it werent for legal loopholes we wouldn't have YouTube and we wouldn't have tourism in eastern Europe. The world isn't as black and white as you portray it and Grooveshark provides an amazing service of much higher quality than Spotify.

We can't all sit on our hands and do nothing because someone in the world thinks we shouldn't. Innovation sometimes requires using loopholes.

People want to do a lot of things, dude.

"Using a legal loophole is not the same as selling drugs or not follow safety regulations."

It's not even a legal loophole; it's straight-up, conscious infringement complete with a wink and nudge.

> So it's okay to abuse the law while building a business because it's "hard" to do it legitimately? You can't be serious? If it's too hard to do it legitimately, you don't do it.

Yeah, we might be a lot better off if people hadn't run to Hollywood to escape enforcement of Edison's patents. Without that city of pirates, things might have turned out very differently.

> Doing what Spotify did isn't that easy.

Indeed.

The record industry's business model for the internet seems to be this: bleed dry any startup (or any company for that matter) who tries to innovate in this space by making them bleed through the nose in legal fees and lose money on ridiculous royalties until they run out of money.

Grooveshark is trying to build a business. To build a business on music you have to let people listen to music. Once they have working business-model (if they ever get there) they can get to paying the artists. I agree it's somewhat twisted, but I think that's what is necessary.

I disagree completely. Grooveshark is trying to build a business, and to do so without paying the artists is unconscionable. They need to have that in place before launching, and if they can't do that, they shouldn't have a business.

Cf Spotify, who did it the right (and difficult) way.

I don't pay attention to this space (I just buy music, lots of it, from iTunes). Can you explain a bit more about how Grooveshark is abusing the DMCA?

(I don't doubt you, for what it's worth; I'm not at all sympathetic to arguments that there should be a "startup exemption" to copyright law).

The DMCA's 'safe harbor' provision[1] allows service providers to not be held responsible for UGC if they respond in a timely manner to takedown requests.

criticalsquid is claiming that they're willfully ignoring pirated content that's being uploaded in order to turn a profit, and that this is an 'abuse' of the DMCA.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dmca#Title_II:_Online_Copyright...

You've oversimplified the DMCA. The "safe harbor" you're referring to includes the requirement that the provider "does not have actual knowledge that the material or an activity using the material on the system or network is infringing; [or] in the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent".

You have to be able to say with a straight face that you couldn't reasonably have known the material was infringing a priori to be eligible.

Yes, sorry. I just assumed that knowledge of infringement would obviously not be okay.

It's an interesting point because knowing/not knowing is not always black and white. While it's almost impossible to determine 100% whether or not something is infringing, not collecting enough data to tell does NOT work. The courts aren't that interested in the specifics, it's "are you the Pirate Bay or are you Facebook?"

> You have to be able to say with a straight face that you couldn't reasonably have known the material was infringing a priori to be eligible.

Copyright infringement is a matter of permission. I'm not sure that it's even possible, a priori, to say that certain material is infringing, unless you have personal knowledge of who uploaded it and who is authorized to. You can usually make a good guess; but it's just a guess.

This even more complicated thanks to the fact that the record labels have authorized marketing agents to release "unauthorized" releases, even ones marked as leaks, via independent channels. They've even have had to un-DMCA them when their own legal departments took them down.

Proof of that statement can be found in the court filings for the Viacom v. YouTube case, incidentally. Lest you think that this was just the assertion of YouTube's lawyers, I will point you further to the fact that Viacom's own lawyers were forced to agree to remove their claims of infringement after it was proven that Viacom itself had uploaded those particular files.

And that? That happened twice. That's after Viacom's own expensive lawyers (allegedly) performed due diligence.

In short, I would like to point out that while you can have a pretty good idea what content is and is not authorized, there are many good reasons, based on actual events, that could give a person a reasonable doubt about whether something might be authorized, especially if there's no DMCA complaint. I can give you a long list incidents if you like, just from memory.

My point is that even the rights holder might not know if they've authorized it, and they're the only people who can be expected to know who all they've authorized.

while you may not support the company and it's methods, the point they are trying to make is more honorable: making the dmca more complicated is pointless.

They're not against making it more complicated, they're for making it less complicated and desirable for them, unless I misread the post. They're for making it "less complicated" with the goal of it changing to covering what they do entirely so Universal etc. can't sue them any more.

"...respectfully submit this opinion in support of such adoption..." (from the letter they want users to send)

Your complaint against them, in your original post, is a legal one. They are advising that action be taken such that they are no longer in such a precarious legal position, which would seem to appease the complaint you made. Absent other reasons to support your position (a few of the many potential reasons: "Copyright is a moral right", "I support the status quo against all comers"), I'm not certain what your argument is.

Edit: To further sate my curiosity: you have repeatedly said that Grooveshark "abuse" the law, which strikes me as a strange choice of word. Do you mean "break"? Or do you mean "they don't break the law, but I believe that what they do should be illegal"? Or something else entirely?

by abuse I mean they take a piece of law (DMCA) and then manipulate it. I absolutely suck at explaining things, so forgive me if it makes no sense, but imagine your parents said to you when you're a child "You can't watch TV after 9PM on a school night" and then at 1am you watch TV and say "but mom, it's not a school night, it's the morning!".

The way Grooveshark do it is by having users upload music, if they wanted to be legitimate they could easily require anyone uploading music to call and verify their identity (how many record labels are there out there?) but instead they have users upload and that covers them under the DMCA, so they can then make money off those uploads and when they're notified it's there (which they of course know it is, that's their entire business!) they say "oh hey, so sorry! We thought it was you uploading, sneaky users eh! We'll delete it now for you" when if they had wanted to make sure the rights owner was uploading in the first place, they could have done.

I have a copy of Rihannas latest album here, if I wanted to upload it to Grooveshark right now for other users to listen to I could, they could prevent that if they wanted but they don't, they use the DMCA to build their business off those uploads.

I hope that explains it, if not I guess I'll just have to give up :( I guess a simple way of explaining it is that without the DMCA, grooveshark could not exist.

Edit: Actually I thought of a better way to explain it, one that I think matches the idea of a hacker more. They had a problem: they needed to stream music to users and cover costs without having the rights to stream that music, they realised to be able to they'd need money and they didn't have it. So they found a solution: DMCA, that would cover what they wanted to do as long as they responded to labels who didn't want their music and they had deniabilty when it came to how the copyrighted content ended up on their service: users uploading.

So they had a problem ("how to stream music that requires rights to stream without those rights") and they found a solution ("dmca") and used the requirements of the dmca ("users uploading and removing when requested") to shape their service. Does that explain it better?

Hmm, a company acting on a legal loop hole, must be a first.

'So they had a problem ("how to stream music that requires rights to stream without those rights") and they found a solution ("dmca") and used the requirements of the dmca ("users uploading and removing when requested") to shape their service.'

That makes what they've done sound entirely reasonable. They had a problem; they came up with a clever solution to it. It didn't even involve large monetary donations to congressmen.

"I guess a simple way of explaining it is that without the DMCA, grooveshark could not exist."

But it does exist.

I don't see the difference in saying "without law X grooveshark couldn't exist" and "without law Y the RIAA lawsuits wouldn't exist", where law Y is current copyright law.

The copyright laws are what they are; there's nothing magical or sacred about them, so I'm failing to see how adhering to the DMCA is somehow crafty or slick or manipulative. (At least not any more so than current application of copyright law.)

Yeah, and I'd be willing to bet their lawyers don't even know how the back-end software works. Idiots.

The really dangerous thing about exploiting the safe harbor provision like this, where you know that almost 100% of the content is infringing, is that it may ultimately provoke legislators (puppetted by the RIAA and other industry groups, of course) to modify the safe harbor provision in a way that is much less tolerant. That is the biggest reason what Grooveshark is doing is a no-no; they're going to spoil it for everyone else.