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Comment by physcab | Hacker News Reader

How are our (I'm a grooveshark employee) legal tactics questionable? We sign deals with new labels all the time and our #1 company-wide goal is to help an artist make over $1M through our service. Here is a list of all our label agreements: http://www.grooveshark.com/labelslist. I don't think its updated though since we have a deal with EMI and I can't find it on the list. Yes, a few of the other majors are missing, but that is always an on-going conversation. We also fully comply with the DMCA in the same way YouTube and all other UGC sites work. Case in point: try searching for Beatles.

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Grooveshark has been playing a lot of copyrighted material without licenses for a very long time. It takes it down; the content reappears. I understand that you're somewhat protected by DMCA, but the entire business was built on the backs of mostly mainstream content. It wasn't until you already had a big audience that you started securing the majority of your most important licenses, and plenty of the music there is still not properly licensed. EMI is a perfect example. Only recently did you get a license from them, and yet their artists have been playing on Grooveshark for ages.

If you really did a good job of making sure the music that was uploaded wasn't copyrighted, you wouldn't have a business because nobody would be looking for that music. The period between illegal mainstream content going up, and that content coming down, is just long enough for Grooveshark to have a competitive cost advantage over companies who properly license their material from day one.

If the tactics aren't at least "questionable", then why has Universal declared "legal jihad" on Grooveshark?

P.S. My band's music is on your site. I didn't put it there and neither did anybody else with proper authority to do so.

Its not a black or white issue. Licensing is incredibly complex with ownership sometimes changing between territories, products, people and having the technology in place to enforce specific terms so all parties are happy. I'm not completely knowledgeable about the subject so I won't comment on that further, but its not something we turn a blind eye to. Our content ID system is getting better and better. Ultimately its a question of resources, and when you're a cash-starved startup, you're spread super thin.

My point is that we genuinely do our best to help artists. We're good people. If you want your band's presence taken down, you're entitled to have that done for you. You can also leave your music up so millions of users can discover it and find out more about who you are. We have tens of thousands of individual artists managing their own music and we get tons of fan mail from artists who say that our platform has not only decreased piracy but has actually encouraged fans to buy more of their music and see their shows.

http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/040811grooveshark

I'm not going to lie, we're competitors, and I have plenty of people tell me they're happy with Grooveshark, and that you provide a lot of value. I also hear the other side, and I hope that Grooveshark gets what it deserves from Universal.

The fact still remains that Grooveshark as it is wouldn't exist if not for the many years it's had to benefit from free use of mainstream content. That's not what DMCA was created for. It was created to protect people who mostly have UGC and occasionally have their terms violated. If Grooveshark was one of those companies, they would look more like Unsigned.com right now.

The music industry's legal system is complex. We all know that. Other companies are navigating that complexity in much more difficult ways, being much more honest to the spirit of the law. Grooveshark takes advantage of the laws and operates a service that has only one foot in legality. Of course it would be easy to build a business that way and then get the praises of those companies you forge relationships with _after_ your audience and platform is already valuable. But there is more to be said for a company that takes the hard road and does the same. I think Pandora has had a miserable time of it, but at least they did it right.

Whichever way you look at it, building a business in the music space is difficult. We're all probably competing with piracy more so than each other. There is no good road. You make it sound like we've had it easy, which is not the case. Every employee has at some time gone without pay for an extended period of time. Mine was 10 months. That's the sort of dedication it takes to bring a product from a thousand users to millions when you're underfunded. And our relationships didn't form suddenly when we had millions of users. They were the result of years of work in the trenches when our userbase was small- going to concerts, promoting artists, branding our site...basically everything we could do to get their songs heard.

I think you're straying a little from the topic. Yes, company building is hard. No, that does not make it okay that Grooveshark built it's business by streaming a lot of mainstream music that it didn't, and in many cases still doesn't, have licenses for.

I didn't say you've had it easy. I said you built your company on the backs of artists' content without paying them. So, each employee went a few months without pay. Most of the artists playing on Grooveshark went (and are still going) much longer.

> "then why has Universal declared "legal jihad" on Grooveshark?"

This isn't to excuse Grooveshark (honestly, not a user, so I have no horse in this race), but attracting the ire of the RIAA/MPAA in and of itself doesn't mean much except that you've gotten some big dogs pissed off at you.

That's true. But Grooveshark has been playing Universal artists for years, millions of times over, without licenses. They're not innocent. They claim DMCA, but they know that they have a ton of copyrighted material on their platform. Say what you will about the RIAA, it doesn't make all of their enemies good people.

Hi, I'm a longtime grooveshark fan and user but I've also had similar questions to the grandparent. You let users upload music arbitrarily. You also add that music to your index and use it globally on the site (or I presume so, since some of your music has irregular tags or tags that say things like "radio rip"). How is this legal? I don't think you're allowed to upload music and keep it there as long as you don't get a complaint about it. That's basically the same thing as having an ftp full of mp3s. You can't even claim that you're not hosting the content. Maybe what you're doing is more similar to what youtube is doing.

It's legal because the person uploading it agrees to their terms and says it's not copyrighted, or that they have the right to upload it. In most cases, these people do not. Grooveshark relies on DMCA and says that they prohibit this behavior but they know full well that tons of the content being uploaded is copyrighted.

The simple fact is, they should know what content they have licenses for, and what content they don't. Maintaining a list of the top 1,000,000 bands in the world and not letting anybody upload tracks with metadata that included those bands and song names in it would not be that difficult. The data is there, because otherwise users could not search for those band names and find what they're looking for.

Simply put, if Grooveshark did everything they could to fight copyrighted material being added to their site, they wouldn't have a business. Maybe now that they have some licenses and an audience they could survive, but they would have never gotten to where they were without significant illegal content being uploaded and accessed by their users.

> Maintaining a list of the top 1,000,000 bands in the world and not letting anybody upload tracks with metadata that included those bands and song names in it would not be that difficult.

I addressed this in my other comment, but as it turns out, this aspect of the problem is incredibly difficult. Metadata can be wrong and we can't always depend on it. So we use waveform analysis. But thats difficult too due to the indexing and storage requirements and the accuracy of the algorithm performing the search. Also this list is not finite. It changes constantly and parties are always bickering over rights to content and that takes time to sort out. We actually have a team of people who handle takedown requests, and we have another team of people who put in the necessary restrictions to keep content from getting played or uploaded.

Have you tried to do a fingerprint of files?

Also, what's waveform analysis?

The simple fact is, without mainstream content, Grooveshark would be a joke. Putting in a requirement - Do not play songs with the word Primus in the metadata - would probably "accidentally" keep out some cover bands' songs that are legally uploaded, but it would do a very good job of keeping out most Primus music. Even if that music showed up, but without the metadata, nobody would be finding it in searches, which also helps eliminate the use of that illegal content. What you do, frankly, is close to the legal minimum because the business wouldn't exist if you did a better job at it.

Within 5 minutes I can go find music on Grooveshark that is there illegally. It ought to be pretty easy for you to do the same queries and prevent that from happening. Would you prevent legal music? Yes. What is more important - that some cover band be allowed to post their music, or that Primus be allowed to retain their rights? Particularly when you consider that nobody is coming to Grooveshark to hear covers of Primus.

I'm not saying that operating legally in the music industry is easy - far from it. But on the spectrum of trying to, unprofitable Pandora is on one side, and Grooveshark is waving hello in the far distance.

P.S. I apologize for saying "the simple fact is" way too often.

If Primus sees their content on our site and they don't want it there, all they have to do is tell us. And we'll do exactly what you say by filtering any mention of the word Primus, take it down promptly and do everything we can to make it never happen again.

I see...so the bands are responsible for knowing about Grooveshark, policing Grooveshark, letting you know, and THEN you'll put preventative measures in place. The point is that those measures should have been in place from the get-go, because anyone in their right mind knows that Primus isn't sitting their uploading their tunes to Grooveshark.

It may not be legal. There is a "red flag" provision in the DMCA which could potentially make Grooveshark liable.

I remember Napster attempting to create a system to block subsequent "sharing" of known copyrighted works.

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