A small Wisconsin company stored thousands of people’s CDs, then vanished
theverge.com
theverge.com
A buyer beware for future sites that promise something similar to the above, it's not worth the webpage it's printed on. Regardless of initial sincerity, this could change at a moment's notice.
We should call this Murfie's Law.
If someone starts throwing CDs in the garbage they are going to get sued hard.
Which is why that kind of promise may matter against some eventualities, but not against “what if the company fails?”, which it is presented as a guarantee against.
The company already failed. It's a different company that would be throwing the discs away, as far as I can tell. One that has money to lose. I can't think of any reason Murfie itself would want to throw anything away, either.
The net effect from the perspective of the owners is, of course, exactly the same as if Murfie was malicious and actively discarding them.
They certainly can dispose of (typically by public auction, not literally throwing it out) property if they have no information that tells them it isn't abandoned property of the tenant and they've followed the applicable law on abandoned tenant property as regards notice to the tenant and opportunity for the tenant to reclaim, which may allow requiring payment of reasonable storage fees and a set time limit.
There's a popular saying that possession is 9/10 of the law; while it's not literally true, it is an important reminder that most physically property isn't mystically imbued with the ability to inform anyone who encounters of it of the identity of the current legal owner, and so the law very often allows presumption of ownership from possession and other circumstances and provides remedies against the party who had direct responsibility to the actual owner for causing loss of they fail in their duty. But if that party is a failed business by the time the owner discovers the failure, that recourse may be disappointingly limited.
I find that very unlikely in this situation.
I've already reached out in a few places with an offer of help, and am going to fly out there to knock on their door Monday morning.
Ownership of physical media means something, and the rights the owners have must be protected.
The person answering the CDreturns2u email address has collected some money from customers and is paying 3 of the last employees to slowly ship media out. He's overloaded with requests and is attempting to answer each one in order, but has several hundred still in the queue. Even sending all requested media back can't solve the whole situation here though. There's just too many disks and not enough time.
I met with one of the creditors and the landlord, and have a meeting scheduled with the other major creditor. Nobody wants to see the CDs thrown away, but the landlord wants to be paid. I've proposed a plan to move all the media to my facility where I could store it as long as needed and would handle all the returns. I'd also work to restore digital access for media still in storage.
There is still hope. Maybe even the start of something better? I've been procrastinating on the launch of Crossies.com for far too long, but it looks like fate is forcing my hand.
Not surprised this happened, not particularly upset.
Years ago I moved to Sonos, did not have a CD player anymore, and did not want to go through the trouble of ripping and storing (where?) my collection. So this was great.
When I started using Apple Music, they had everything anyway for $10/month, and never bothered to use Murfie.
If I ever thought I had something valuable, I would never have shipped them to some startup.
do I need to keep them indefinitely? what if they were lost, would I be obligated to delete the rips?
https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#117
Based on that, I don't think you would need to delete them.
- If you sell or give the CDs to someone else, you are legally obliged to delete the rips.
- But if you toss them in a landfill, you are free and clear.
It's surprising to me that there is still no iTunes-like service that just sells CD-quality audio. Sure there is HDTracks, but their price is way too high to be reasonable (usually double the iTunes price, or more) and their selection is pretty limited. Even Amazon's music store, with it's "Auto-Rip" feature when you buy a real CD, only gives you 256k MP3s. So for now, the most reasonable way for me to download FLACs is to torrent.
Isn't that Tidal's thing?
That all said, Tidal sounds amazing and its videos are extremely high quality as well. I had serious issues with its desktop client last time I tried which caused me to switch back to spotify. The library is much smaller as well but that didn't matter as much because of the clear tradeoff in quality.
... which unfortunately went out of business in 2017.
Sounds like a job for the Jason Scott...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10064565
...not to actually archive them, but to help the original owners get their property back.
another thought...how many of those CDs came from columbia house ;)
Even after learning that you would have lost your entire collection?
https://madison.com/business/when-the-music-stops-madison-ba...
https://www.bbb.org/us/wi/middleton/profile/online-shopping/...
At least it sounds like everyone had a local copy of their bits.
O.O
I had an older family member ask me "are you sure it won't go anywhere?" while I was encouraging them to use cloud storage such as Dropbox or Google Drive rather than a flash drive.
While I had naively never given it that much thought before, I wasn't sure the answer was "yes"— specifically that, if Dropbox or Google Drive were to shut down, they would give users the opportunity to take their files out.
I tried searching through their ToS but couldn't find any guarantees.
But in this case, I think ToS are insufficient, unless backed by physics - specific guarantees and allocated (escrow) funds, or insurance, for example, to purchase the replacement.
And sometimes you need to put a level of trust in a service. I've sent things off to be scanned because, realistically, it was never going to happen otherwise and I really wanted to get the materials into digital form.
Very true, think of all the people using cloud-first tools like Google Docs or Google Sheets - how many bother to download/backup those files?
Also, it's guaranteed to be small (2 GB) so it's easy to backup.
The problem is, who guarantees the guarantors?
With this, you have nothing.