Court Recognizes DMCA Safe Harbor in Universal v Grooveshark Lawsuit
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They're not even reasonable about uploading; I login to Grooveshark and go to "My Music" and click "Upload" and it asks me to upload my library, nowhere does it mention "oh btw if you don't own the rights don't do it", that's hidden on the terms of service page. The language used on the upload page is I'm sure well crafted so that they don't fall foul of the law but don't dissuade users from uploading: "...and only upload content that does not infringe upon the rights of others.". Why isn't that "Do not upload content that you are not licensed to distribute"?
I must be missing something.
Edit: to clarify for anyone that doesn't understand how Grooveshark works. They encourage users to upload their own music collection and do not at any point explain to the user that the music they're uploading is available to everyone or that what they're doing is illegal. Yes they're DMCA compliant but only at the very minimum required; if they wanted to be respectful towards labels/artists they could quite easily prevent people from uploading unlicensed material.
Artists choose to sign with a record label, Rihanna wasn't forced at gun point to become part of Def Jam, she chose to and in return Grooveshark are streaming her music anyway claiming that it's "for the artists" and "we comply with DMCA so it's okay".
The bear minimum is all they have to do. That's why it's called the minimum.
> they claim with a straight face that they're supporting artists
Correct me if I'm wrong, but "artists" is not a single entity or trade group. They are supporting artists that choose to use their service for distribution. They aren't supporting Rihanna, and I'm fairly certain that they don't have to.
> "we comply with DMCA so it's okay"
Well yeah. They do comply (as ruled here). So it is okay.
Sites like reddit and HN and, yes, Grooveshark couldn't get off the ground if they had to proactively filter 100% of submitted content. We as a society have decided that we value that over stopping 100% of illegal copying so we're okay with laws that work to take the content down afterwards.
If you want to use reddit as an example we'd have to pretend that reddit downloads the content from any submitted link and serves it, so let's pretend that happens: if a company went to reddit and said please stop downloading our website content when it's submitted from the domain website.com, would you do that? Would you tell them to fuck off? While profiting from that content?
Grooveshark could if they wanted without any effort comply with what companies like Universal want. They choose not to. It's not about whether or not they comply with the law. It's absolutely not unreasonable for any artist to expect their music not to be on Grooveshark, Grooveshark made a business decision to use the DMCA to their advantage.
> They aren't supporting Rihanna, and I'm fairly certain that they don't have to.
That's fine, they don't have to support Rihanna, but what they should not then do is take her content anyway. If they're not willing to comply with the wishes/expectations of the rights holder (which probably isn't Rihanna but let's pretend it is for simplicities sake) then they SHOULD NOT be making money from that content!
Grooveshark is a business that takes other peoples content WITHOUT PERMISSION and then makes money from that content and uses the DMCA to get away with it, doing the bare minimum to be compliant. How can anyone defend that?
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-ge...
It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement. Sure people could upload Rihanna's music under the name "Johnny John Johnson" but then nobody would find it, so the problem would be solved. Grooveshark choose not to do this because they are driving revenue with unlicensed music.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html
You've also missed all the "Riana," "Rihana," "Rieana," etc. songs out there, making your filter both harmful to innocent people and worthless at stopping infringement.
EDIT: And this part is badly mistaken: "It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement." So you have 1 copy for people to download instead of 100. But 1 is enough for everyone, so you've made no dent in piracy whatsoever, because everyone will copy the one file that is available and won't even care that there aren't 99 more copies of it.
Yes, the idea of a single if statement is over simplifying, but it's an example of how easy such a system is. If I was grooveshark and actually building such a system I would build in common song name matching (eg: If Rihanna is the artist name and the song is "Rude boy" then it's bad, if the song is "Hacker News is fun!" it's probably not!
The point is, a system for matching against names of popular artists is trivial to build, are you denying that? If someone tasked you with building a system that could take an mp3 + title + artist and tell if it was the song of a popular artist in a database could you not do that?
And you have to cast it widely to even put a dent into things, because you only need one copy available for everyone to copy it. Just one false negative out of millions of songs and everyone copies that one that slipped through. They need exactly one search result, not 100. Google does all that you say and more on YouTube. Let me know how hard it is for you to find infringing content there (hint: not very)? Sure, they play whack-a-mole with it. But that damned mole keeps popping back up and it's not hard to find a mole that hasn't yet been whacked.
Worse, the more you tighten up that code, the more Prof. Ushers you ban. We have Google blocking access to bird songs already. And I know you know how skilled their coders are.
You should have at least banned the cryptographic hashes of anything that got DMCA'd. At least that has few false positives (assuming few DMCA notices are false). It's vulnerable to deliberate infringers making tiny changes to the files, sure, but I'm unaware of any solution that isn't. And you're required to ban anyone who is a repeat infringer anyhow. But we're playing whack-a-mole. More moles always pop up.
Yes, a copy of Rihanna's latest album could slip through but it would have to be hidden under a different name for that to happen, then how are people going to find it? If you want to listen to Rihanna on Grooveshark then you type "Rihanna" into the search engine.
> Worse, the more you tighten up that code, the more Prof. Ushers you ban. We have Google blocking access to bird songs already. And I know you know how skilled their coders are.
That's completely different though, context is important. Grooveshark is a "free Spotify", Youtube is a video community and a video hosting platform. Grooveshark has one use case, Youtube has many. For example Youtube developers work to catch music that is a part of a video that isn't necessarily focused on the song, that would never happen with Grooveshark. Also external sites embed Youtube uploads and use that to host music, can't be done with Grooveshark.
The fact is you or I (or any slightly competent developer) could build a system that could block almost every single possible upload that labels/artists don't want uploaded, Grooveshark CHOOSE not to do this.
As a user you need to know what you're looking for, you need to tell the search engine what you're looking for, if you're looking for Rihanna you don't type "r1h4nna4534535" and so if someone uploads the latest Rihanna album with the artist name "r1h4nna4534535" who is going to find it? Hell, even if they did there are solutions to that problem.
Of course they don't, it's not their job to police someone else's copyrights. Do you think Escape's shareholders wouldn't sue the officers of the company for breach of fiduciary duty if they discovered they were spending company funds to prop up some other business? If you own a copyright, it's your own job to enforce it. Why should copyright holders get to freeload off Grooveshark's work?
That said, please understand that I do sympathize with you about artists getting screwed. I just don't want to see solutions where we merely pass the buck to someone else without getting at any of the underlying problems. Frankly, I believe that the solutions lie more along the lines of making sure that artists get their cut, rather than restricting who can listen to music and how. But I certainly don't have all the answers here.
As far as the suffering of the music industry. Music sales are up, not down. There are also plenty of studies that show people who listen to artists online for free have a higher likelihood of purchasing the album online or attending a concert. People are buying more indy artists, not just what they hear on the radio and the middlemen in the record companies no longer control the distribution channels or who is exposed to what artists. Artists are benefiting from this loss of control, so I don't exactly feel bad for Universal, a one of the many record companies that has fought tooth and nail against any progress in consumer friendly methods of distribution and a legit and easy alternative to pirating. It took Apple to get them to finally let people buy audio files, and even then it was locked down which hurt people buying the music, not the people downloading MP3's off Limewire. They created the situation they are in now.
They don't need to filter the audio files themselves, that's completely un-needed, all they need to do is filter the meta data (eg: artist name, song title, album name). That is not hard. If you have a list of artists with their songs and albums you could easily match the submitted data against this and work out if the submission is disallowed. If they upload with "fake" meta data (eg: fake artist name) it doesn't matter because no user is going to find that music.
IRS: It says here you only paid the bare minimum in taxes, what do you have to say for yourself?
Fire marshall: It seems you only have the minimum fire protection requirements. Looks like you're haphazardly endangering people by not going above and beyond
Building inspector: Hmm, it seems you only have the bare minimum of one access ramp. If you really cared to honor the disability act, you'd have 2, at least 3. There are other buildings that have all these special facilities you know?
No matter how big a company or industry is it's still made up of people. No they don't need "championing" but they certainly don't deserve to be intentionally screwed by companies and then those companies supported.
Regardless of the law Grooveshark is taking another companies content without permission and making money from it. HN users go ape-shit when someone "steals" another startups website design, why does that sense of fairness and equality not extend to everyone?
Well in the United States it is relatively common for murderers to be put to death.
so lets put this together 1. this is the status quo to use eulas to protect your ass
2. the 'victims' are rolling in money and are shit people anyways
so given a limited amount of energy and political will why the hell would you ever champion this cause.
why would you make such a big deal out of this issue thats CLEARLY in a gray zone, especially when the people hurt are the idiots who are screwing you over
I also think Grooveshark's service has become less of a place for popular music consumption than indie/ self-made content because there are, quite frankly, much better options (ITunes, Spotify, Rdio) if you want to listen to your Billboard Top 100. And I think indie artists actually love having their content on Grooveshark. Grooveshark runs site-wide campaigns for new bands, they have a sweet bus that goes to concerts and records artists unplugged, and their radio service is very niche focused.
Grooveshark provides a legit service, as long as they take down the music when requested by a copyright holder, they are following the same rules as everyone else.
The broader discussion here it that the cost of enforcing copyright protection should fall on the copyright owners. And it's obvious that they're not up to the task, which is another clear signal that their business models sit at odds with the current state of technology.
Are you surprised that when you buy a knife, it doesn't come with a warning explaining that you can't stab people with it? Uploading music you don't have a redistribution license for is not against the ToS, it's against the law. You're supposed to know it in the first place.
Of course Grooveshark might still be inducing infringement or something like that, so I have no idea about your second paragraph.
Search for The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd on Youtube and let me know what you find. None of those artists want any of their content digitally distributed (none of their content is even on Spotify). So, unless they have some sort of deal with these artists that I don't know about these are all unlicensed recordings.
And I do realize that a lot of these are live recordings, which have their own issues. But, plenty of them aren't and have millions of views.
The standard they must adhere to is the law. If this is unreasonable, and law is often unreasonable, the proper response is to change the law, not to ask the courts to create their own standard of compliance that excludes someone who is, by your own admission, DMCA compliant.
It's websites like Grooveshark that weaken the premise for laws like DMCA safe harbour. Their entire business lies in using DMCA in a way in which it was clearly not designed, making it much easier to against such provisions. It's not only big music who might lose out because of them.
Grooveshark aren't for anybody other than themselves, they base their entire business on people uploading sharing songs without giving any money to the musicians. If a user uploads the song, not a registered artist then the artist gets nothing and the money goes where?
As a result I believe through those actions they weaken the argument for DMCA safe harbour provisions by showing such a clear loophole in the meaning.
That's my moral and non-legal argument against Grooveshark (but not for Universal).
The argument that they're abusing the DMCA is a slippery slope. Who else should be helping the copyright holders freeload on their enforcement duties? Your ISP? Computer manufacturers? Your landlord, for not not searching your home regularly for copyright-violating media?
The law is a set of tools commonly used to give people a sense that there is justice and order in our society. When the tools are found inadequate, new ones are developed. Ultimately, this probably won't work in Grooveshark's favor.
If you don't like it, you can advocate for a change in the law. Frankly, you underrate the difficulty sites like Grooveshark face. Copyright infringement relies upon whether or not a person has permission and that's not something a computer program can determine.
You're using a simple heuristic that doesn't work well at scale, relies upon human judgement (which also doesn't scale), and fails utterly when the marketing departments of these places put out their own leaked versions of things (see Viacom v. YouTube) which are permitted.
It's weird how often I hear how "easy" this is. This is HN. If you want me to believe that it's easy, create a computer program that acts as a filter and we'll see how well it works in the real world. I realize that you see someone getting shafted and want to fix that. That's a good thing. The problem is that you advocate for a solution that would merely shaft someone else instead. That's not a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license
If they don't like it, they should change the law, rather than ask the courts to make up new laws for people to follow on the spot.
There is no compulsory license for sound recordings in any territory for downloads or interactive streaming. You have to explicit permission from the copyright owner to make the recording available for download or interactive streaming, i.e. you can choose when to listen to it.
There is a compulsory license in most territories for the composition side, under certain specific conditions, in which an entity like Grooveshark would obtain a mechanical license for the composition from the copyright holder of the composition (usually music publishers) in advance of its public availability, and then account and pay royalties for its use. This requires Grooveshark to know the songwriters, publishers, and splits of each work, which is not something that comes from the user uploads. It may be the case that their terms of use pass this responsibility to the uploader.
In short, however, you need sets of permission (sound recording and composition) to legally distribute music for download or interactive streaming.
I realize that there are a lot of lawsuits alleging that, but as far as I know they are all still pending and nothing of the sort has been established in court. That makes your statement premature, at best.
Personally, I put about as much stock those claims as SCO's claims that we should all write them $699 checks for Linux, but we'll find out whenever the courts rule.
Feel free to supply a Pacer link if the situation changes.
The New York court mentioned in the article these comments are attached to.
The MegaUpload case is entirely different. It is a federal criminal indictment and none of the allegations have yet been proven in court. Grooveshark has not been charged with anything of the sort. However, given that Hollywood has circulated a "hit list" of businesses they want to kill around Washington (one of which was MU, incidentally), I would not be overly surprised if it comes to that eventually.
I really don't see how the 70 cents are ever going to help an artist.
I don't think many people are going to sign a legal agreement and then purposely claim other people's songs. The legal and financial liability from that is huge and much more direct.
[1]: http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/comdiv/newyork_bio_Kapnick.sh...
A judge has handed controversial music streaming service Grooveshark a major win in a dispute with record label Universal Music, rejecting an argument which would make Grooveshark responsible for determining the copyright status of all pre-1972 recordings. Arguing in a New York court, Universal had attempted to claim that safe harbor provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) do not apply to recordings made before 1972, as the recordings were not covered by federal copyright law at the time of their creation.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/11/3151127/grooveshark-dmca-u...
In some ways, I'm grateful to Universal for running the argument as it's one less cause of action that can be argued in the future, or at least can be dismissed much more easily by relying on the precedent.