Universal Music Sues Grooveshark for 100,000 Illegal Uploads
techland.time.com
techland.time.com
Besides, even if Grooveshark wanted to make a deal (I'm sure they do), they couldn't afford Universal. The vast majority of grooveshark users don't pay, but just get ads. For the ones that do pay, their monthly fee still pales in comparison to the value of the hundreds or thousands of songs they've stored in their account. I've got 300 songs in my GrooveShark. Even if were paying the $6 per month, it would take 50 months to cover the costs of those songs at $0.99 each. And during those 50 months, I would have probably added another 300 songs.
The only end game I see here is GrooveShark going out of business. And I say this with great sadness, because I'm a regular user and love the service.
1. http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/stories/090310groovesharkumg
*According to the leaked emails.
Both Spotify and Grooveshark pay royalties to labels that they have a license agreement with. But if you don't want your stuff on a streaming service, users will upload it to Grooveshark anyway.
This is also the reason why there is so much cool stuff on Grooveshark that is not on Spotify. Forgotten albums, bootlegs, remixes and mainstream music from certain bands. Grooveshark will also never show you a "this song is not available in your region" message.
I thoroughly disagree with this. Corporations often wage "ideological" "wars". That's what lobbying is all about -- a corporation has decided Public Policy X will either help or harm their corporate interests, so they pay lobbyists to advocate for or against it.
Media companies like Universal, Disney, et al guard copyright very closely. They want to advocate the belief that intellectual property is identical to physical property and that the only rights anyone has to an idea are the rights that the idea's copyright owner decides they should have (usually granted when the petitioners include a large check with their request for rights).
Copyright is the most vital issue to media companies and they treat it as such. If they find what they believe to be gross infringement, they are not kind to its purveyors -- I think we've had enough history in filesharing to know that.
Grooveshark is just another way to skin the cat. Its extensive (and some would say "egregious") use of DMCA safe harbor provisions I think probably is one of the major inspirations for SOPA and PROTECT-IP. Cases against Kazaa, Grokster, and others did not come attached with new legislation because they didn't really have a plausible case under the DMCA. Grooveshark's service-oriented approach makes them a clear safe harbor, and unless Grooveshark quickly sees legitimization as a marketing channel and gets "white-knighted" a la YouTube and Google, they will remain rogue and the media companies will keep hounding until they get at the jugular. Since Grooveshark is using DMCA as a cover, the media companies just want complete control over "the internet" (i.e., the internet as most people know it, DNS) so they can send the Federal Bureau of Cybercrime Protection a notice and have Grooveshark or other services with a plausible legal defense blacklisted just like that -- no need for pesky "trials" when records companies are losing hypothetical money!
It should be common knowledge by now that old media will keep at this game until it ruins them. They are absolutely committed to it, and they will fight to death -- either theirs or ours -- to get copyright the way they want it, so that they can gain more cash from the so-called "lost sales" perpetrated by anyone listening to major label music or watching major studio movies but not buying at retail or iTunes.
Rather, the industry decided long ago that it would take it as an a priori truth that any kind of piracy costs them money, and act accordingly. That's an ideological stance.
Grooveshark is not really "piracy" since every content owner gets paid regardless of the origin of the content. Whether it cannibalizes other revenue sources is up for debate.
However, copyright is also about control and owners want complete control of their catalogs.. for a good reason.
Grooveshark crowdsources catalogs without permission from copyright owners and then only lets them manage the content via DMCA takedowns. The labels have to relinquish control to the users for this system to work and that is what they are objecting too.
Money and control is what copyright is about. Big media are ideologically against Grooveshark paying their users to seed the system without the owners consent.
To use an analogy: Grooveshark is a grocery store where the customers personally stock the shelves with Coca-cola products but the company doesn't get to decide which products are available. Maybe the customers don't like Coke Zero and refuse to stock it. Coca-cola can't do anything except remove stock they don't want there.
Except the analogy falls down since Grooveshark is digital and the shelf space is infinite. The labels can add their entire catalog themselves, but they don't want to.
If a band is touring the world to promote an album, their presence in a given country has a huge impact on sales in that country.
If music is leaked across the internet way in advance of the tour/pr/marketing drive, then sales of the album drop precipitously. It's not possible to be everywhere on Earth at once, so it's then impossible to effectively market the album.
Crooked movie/entertainment businessmen? Sounds just like those old gangster/movie tycoons in the old Raymond Chandler novels I've been rereading since moving to LA!
If anyone else streams or buys those songs, then the content owner will get paid.
Meanwhile the ads or the $6 a month fee goes only towards the songs that YOU actually STREAM from the service at streaming rates. Plus you can buy other songs for 99 cents.
If you never listen to your uploaded songs again, someone else will and they will be the ones paying the content owners.
Content owners get paid whenever anyone strams or buys anything on the system regardless of where it came from.
Those numbers seem ridiculous. I imagine the only real purpose they serve is to create fear in similar / emerging ventures and to set an upper bound that guarantees bankruptcy.
It seems as pointless as condemning somebody to 1000 death sentences.
US copyright act: "the copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action".
Statutory damages in the US are a minimum of $200 per work and a max of $150k. The minimum is quite the minimum too: "In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200".
s. 504 "Remedies for infringement: Damages and profits" http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.pdf
Also can get lawyer fees under s. 505. So statutory minimum + big legal costs.
Universal's actual losses might be zero but as long as they can prove infringement and that the defendant (intentionally or not) was an infringer, they can get a judgment for damages.
Of course winning some copyright litigation and winning the larger battle over monopolistic control of music distribution channels may be two different things.
Media is a two way market. Both content owners and buyers must be completely satisfied for the market to work effectively.
The two problems with labels: 1. they want to get paid alot and 2. they want to control their catalogs so that they can control their marketing.
The two problems with customers: 1. they want to pay less and 2. they want to listen to whatever they like.
Grooveshark solves these problems completely. They pay copyright holders to stream songs on the system and charge customers through ads or fees for the service.
At the same time, missing songs in the library can be uploaded by users and they get fairly paid for the "work" from Grooveshark's profits. Content owners don't have to do any work to seed the system with their content but they get paid for every stream or download.
So labels save money by not having to manage their content, since, in theory, it's already been uploaded by users and the crowdsourcers make money "working" for Grooveshark.
The catalog ends up more complete than labels typically allow and the users are happier. Everybody wins.
The only problem is that the system only works if the labels give up some control and they HATE that.
Hopefully Grooveshark survives, I think it has the best shot at finding a workable path for everyone.
I remember hearing Shawn Fanning say he never shared anything illegal on Napster.
I figured that the labels were simply building enough evidence to simply destroy the service outright which will clearly send a message to anyone else who wants to do something similar.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
I would really love it if Spotify could take some UI lessons from Grooveshark.
In retrospect, it's only a matter of time before the labels go all Napster on their ass.
Nevermind the fact that a simple Firefox plugin lets you download the MP3 for each song that you listen to for free...
It is really poorly organized like napster was as well - every user who has renamed a song or used alternate spelling comes up, names that make no sense, poor quality rips, etc.
I've been using Grooveshark for a couple of years now and I didn't even know they were illegal (I figured they had deals with all of the record companies) until I saw info posted about it here on HN.
[0]: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-57327815-261/lawsuit-claim...
http://torrentfreak.com/why-most-artists-profit-from-piracy/
My own experience anecdotally disproves your last statement entirely, but the case against freely available music 'obviously' being bad for music labels and artists doesn't' end there.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/apr/21/study-finds-pira... http://www.pcworld.com/article/236214/study_casts_pirate_sit... http://torrentfreak.com/pirates-are-the-music-industrys-most...
Indeed, your position has a fantastic history of ridiculousness: http://www.diabolicalplan.com/uploaded_images/Home_taping_is...
And let's bring the crusade against the VCR while we're at it: http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id408.htm and then, move on to how rented videos became a source of greater profit for studios than theaters.
I, personally, buy music that is available on Grooveshark. I can think of several Bands I discovered on Limewire way back ended up benefiting from my becoming a long-term fan, attending several concerts, and purchasing many albums... which never would have happened if all I had was 30 second samples on Amazon, for example.
Next, Grooveshark is absolutely not a 'company formed to exploit a legal technicality, nothing more' - they are a pioneering company bucking the ridiculous status quo.
To top it all off, I'm a working musician. Have a nice day.
Have you considered that being a working musician may be why you are willing to pay for music that is otherwise free?
a: you can't count on a given album remaining on grooveshark forever b: streaming is not as convenient as having a real file c: I genuinely appreciate music and want to support my favored semi-obscure musicians d: albums on GS may be incomplete or lower quality e: I don't have an issue coming up with $10 here and there
This may be related to my personality and experiences but I don't think it's related to my income sources (which are not solely music of course).
I mainly use GS to discover new music, and listen to mixes and live shows which are not for sale.
Do you think this is a mainstream position to hold? See, I'm not an audiophile, I don't often go to concerts, and neither are anybody I know in real life. We just listen to music because it's nice. Do you think people like me actually are buying music in droves, and I'm just an outlier? Because from my perspective, people who like "semi-obscure" bands and people who want to pay for stuff not on groove shark are by far the minority.
A lot of people use Youtube as their radio, and basically I see Grooveshark as doing the same thing. Why be forced to stream a video when you just want to hear the audio?
.... that's a lot of music to buy, dude. Did you mean "10-15 dollars"?
If the RIAA/MPAA should rule our world, then $15 billion should be the price of a sandwich.
Probably better to do for a new startup.
A service like this is bound to yield inconsistent quality, and YouTube will constantly be removing videos, but I suppose it could be made to work.
The innovation is really about labeling YT vids with the correct metadata automatically, rather than manually. In fact, YT should be connecting its music and artists to Musicbrainz already upon upload. It's about connecting artists and songs on yt to their corresponding pages on MB,
In effect, there could be a browser plugin that placed a play button next to each song here that gets the right song every time: http://musicbrainz.org/release/8d0bc6d4-8700-44e8-90c8-b86c2... - you could also bookmark songs for your collection.
YT must be already catalogging its music to some extent to produce artist pages like this: http://www.youtube.com/artist/Pearl_Jam
So you could take your local mp3 collection, tag it, save as a playlist, delete all the files and then access all the music on site from YT via the playlist.
I think the best way to operate such a system without YT involvement would be to have a browser plugin that fingerprints and tags YT music vids as they're played in the browser, there'd have to be some interaction, but as a distributed effort, you'd gradually build up a yt-mb database.
Way to go, Universal.
How many of the people using this Grooveshark service are present/former/would-be Universal customers?
How do you prove this? Should you attempt to prove it before deciding to sue?
What if the people using Grooveshark are just too cheap or too poor to ever buy Universal releases? Is that possible?
On the flipside, what if they are also Universal's best customers? Is that possible?
The article says they named specific uploaders in the complaint. Maybe they have been able make some assumptions about them as existing/potential customers? (e.g. They have some assets and/or they've bought Universal releases in the past.)