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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

> Effectively a tool for adding background tunes to a chat room, Groovy worked by pulling audio directly from YouTube videos, joining voice calls, and playing music queued up by users

It's not surprising that this was shut down like most "freeload until we get caught" hobby crafts.

But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services?

For example, if you were able to give Groovy your Youtube Music API key at a subscription level premium enough for your Discord server, but that doesn't exist on Youtube.

I can imagine there isn't much upside for the big players in these hard spaces to support "glue app" value like Groovy, but how can you build Groovy without building your own music service?

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Any service that broadcasts licensed music to users is going to have issues like this someday. See how tricky it is to have legal background music on a Twitch stream.

I think the best way forward for this kind of thing is to not broadcast the music but instead have each user use their own local player with their personal Spotify/YouTube account and sync the playlist through a shared service.

Metallica played BlizzCon and the stream on Twitch had their audio replaced / covered up by elevator music [1]

[1] https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/9529030/twitch-metal...

Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music on Twitch during the pandemic. While in Li's case, it's possible that he didn't consult other rightsholders, Mike Shinoda mentioned that rights for Linkin Park music are held by a small number of people (possibly just the band?) and he offered Twitch that he could provide explicit consent from those people if they could exempt his channel from DMCA enforcement of LP music - twitch replied they simply didn't have a system in place that could handle that.

> Similarly Mike Shinoda (Linkin Park) and Herman Li (Dragonforce) ran into trouble performing their own music on Twitch during the pandemic

My god we live in a strange world.

Not in this case. It’s incorrect to call that they “own” the music if they don’t own the rights to it anymore because they sold the rights to someone else in exchange for money.

One can make a great painting and then sell the painting and the right to make copies of the painting to someone else. In this case, they would not be able to redraw that painting anymore than anyone else can.

As the rest of the comment says: "Mike Shinoda mentioned that rights for Linkin Park music are held by a small number of people (possibly just the band?) and he offered Twitch that he could provide explicit consent from those people if they could exempt his channel from DMCA enforcement of LP music"

Just because a creator can sell the rights does not automatically mean that every creator has. Let's assume good faith on the part of someone as proud of their work (and deservedly so) as Mike Shinoda.

And the creator may retain their right to distribute, perform etc.

We've even see law enforcement blast copyrighted music to prevent video from ending up online. I think you're right, the ability to synchronize clients via playlist versus streaming is going to be the path forward.

I'd love to see the copyrights holders go after law enforcement officer for unauthorized public performance of their songs. If a business owner has to pay a license to play music in their shop, or a DJ needs licenses to play a wedding, LEOs should not get a free pass to play copyrighted music in public.

The best way forward would be to abolish copyright. The only people making serious money in the current system are a fraction of a percent of the most popular artists and a constellation of middlemen who skim money off the top. And as sibling comments point out, the status quo is actually harmful to artists who want to play their music online.

Discord has spotify integration so you can have group listening sessions, but it only works for premium users.

I'm always surprised the source code doesn't accidentally leak out when this sort of C&D occurs

> a big "fuck you" to google

Ehh, I'll be the devil's advocate, google makes money via tracking and ads. Both were avoided by using the bot. big brother is just protecting their business model.

I'd take a bet that the email chain that began the process to send Groovy the C&D started with one of the companies who license music to YouTube.

The code used for scraping YouTube and streaming audio to Discord has always been open source:

- https://github.com/sedmelluq/lavaplayer

- https://github.com/freyacodes/Lavalink

Discord.js (the primary Node.js interface to the Discord API) is chock full of exactly this code -- as examples even. Using ytdl to stream into voice channels.

This is why copyright is dumb and doesn't translate properly to cyberspace. There is no way in hell the RIAA would bring a case against you for listening to a record that you own in the privacy of your home with a group of your friends. This is the exact cyberspace equivalent to this meatspace activity, which is obviously entirely legal and desirable and socially acceptable. The fact that we can't have nice things over a technicality that there's some distance involved and computers is utterly insane.

> But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services?

Probably not because it would count as a performance and no consumer music services are licensed for that. You'd need something like whatever pubs and shops use.

So the question is how do we create a space for something like this? I don't think most people consider this kind of music as a "performance" it's just the RIAA dictating stuff.

Realistically this will probably spawn a bunch of small scale (i.e. single server), bespoke music bots doing the exact same thing.

The way to enable this would require some legislation. It doesn't matter what most people consider, legally it is performance and RIAA has the right to dictate stuff regarding it unless/until the laws change.

So the way to go is by public advocacy and lobbying, not by looking for e.g. some technical solution.

What about just syncing the playlist and seek position and leaving the actual playback to every client with original youtube player (or even better music.youtube.com) ?

> But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services?

One could always build an AI that train on the youtube data to provide background music that take a suggestion from discord and then fill in music that is generated with portions that are recognizable from copyrighted music but then does not do provide the whole song. User can then rate the background music and provide input to the AI.

AI copyright laundering is going to be a fascinating new legal domain.

> But is there a way to build this service in a legit way on top of any existing music services?

Discord surely have enough lawyers and, you'd hope with a $10bn valuation, enough financial clout to wave at the record companies to get the kind of license they'd need to give their users background tunes.

But that would cost them time, money, and put them on the hook for shenanigans...

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