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Strictly speaking there's no requirement to actively filter content. YouTube goes beyond the DMCA safe-harbor provisions because they want a friendly relationship with Big Content. GrooveShark recognizes that their model is incompatible with that of the record labels, so they hide in the letter of the law. Though it is hard to see how GrooveShark could possibly dodge the "direct financial benefit" or "red flag" tests.

I know it's not required, my point was more than Grooveshark are claiming that they comply and they're great and all but they do the bear minimum, they do enough to not get sued, but then they claim with a straight face that they're supporting artists etc.

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".

pretty sure this is how ALL other software business view the consumer, what grooveshark does is no different then any of the other companies hiding behind giant eulas. except instead of screwing us the user with bait and switches and unreadable legal jargon they are protecting us behind it, if you upload something you don't own the rights to you can claim ignorance, if they get sued they can claim its against the eula everyone wins except the leeches. this is the least of any of our problems in tech right now go champion some other cause, but these content holders are the last people that needs championing

Just like murderers don't deserve human rights?

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?

> Just like murderers don't deserve human rights?

Well in the United States it is relatively common for murderers to be put to death.

what im saying is what grooveshark does is normal software business, and since the victims are people that are trying to destroy digital privacy for their own gain I dont give a shit and neither should you.

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

> they do the bear minimum, they do enough to not get sued

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.

Bare minimum, guys.

This reminds me of that part in Office Space where the manager complains about the waitress' "15 pieces of flare". I can only imagine the comedy of having it apply to legal and other areas of life...

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?

I just had to say something before everyone was talking about the minimum number of bears that need to be around for someone to be guilty under the DMCA. Personally, I would be more worried about the bear maximum, but IANAL.

How can you possibly compare HN, reddit and Grooveshark? The first 2 aggregate links to content, Grooveshark distributes content (often unlicensed). That's akin to comparing IMDB and iTunes, because both have movie related content? It's nonsensical.

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?

It is nowhere near as easy as you suppose to filter out all unlicensed content with a computer program. If you believe otherwise, feel free to create and market such a system so that we can judge for ourselves. Google, a company who has plenty of capable coders, wrote their own such system. It misidentified birdcalls as copyrighted music:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-ge...

if(artist.name == "Rihanna") error("You can't post Rihanna");

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.

Congrats, you just banned Prof. Usher's lecture notes:

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.

Now you're just being intentionally stupid.

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?

Searching for "usher.mp3" where the artist.name = Usher is pretty much exactly how Prof. Usher's lecture notes got DMCA'd. I'll give you credit that you could probably ban most of the typos of Rihanna, though. But the wider you cast that net, the more "dolphins" like Prof. Usher you're going to catch.

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.

You're misunderstanding how Grooveshark works and why this would matter.

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.

"Grooveshark CHOOSE not to do this."

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?

Banning via cryptographic hashes are honestly better for this, even then. Yes, it's flawed, but I know of nothing better. Name filtering is just a mess. A long time ago, I read up on soundex/metaphone, Levenshtein distance, etc. and wrote what was essentially a search engine for names. When I tried to make it loose enough to catch most common typos, a search for "the jerk" gave my boss as the top result. That was not planned and he was never once a jerk to me.

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.

No, assuming filters are easy and foolproof is intentionally stupid and ignorant. Google took years to develop the technology and it was because they had the massive capital at their disposal. But all it takes to get around the technology is apply a few audio/video filters to get around the fingerprinting technology and words and phrases don't work, what if its a celebrity gossip video on Rihanna? That's fair use. The technology Google developed is easily gotten around by those determined and hits enough false positives that people with legitimate content have their videos taken down for no reason.

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.

You're missing the point!

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.

I don't know about you, but a bunch of my friends go to Youtube precisely because they can listen to pirated music. In fact, sometimes when I'm at parties, people pull up their own youtube playlists that are exactly the same content Grooveshark would have.

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.

Yeah, I go to Grooveshark to listen to remixes and artists I find on turntable.fm I can't simply listen to through Amazon MP3, Rhapsody, etc.

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.

Grooveshark has no legal obligation to tell their users what can and can't be uploaded. Their only obligation is to follow the DMCA procedures when they receive a takedown notice for content that is allegedly infringing.

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.

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.

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.

If you go to a website and click "My Music" and then it says "Upload your music collection to be accessed from anywhere" and doesn't explicitly state "It's illegal to upload music you are not licensed to distribute, you're posting music to be listened to by any user of Grooveshark" and then distributes every upload you submit to every user of that website I would not compare that to buying a knife and not being told it can kill people.

The DMCA doesn't say they have to pre-screen everything. Youtube goes above and beyond what the law requires (in many cases to the detriment of its users). The law doesn't say "you have to do whatever other, similar companies do". It says "here is what you have to do".

Of course Grooveshark might still be inducing infringement or something like that, so I have no idea about your second paragraph.

"companies like Youtube actively work to prevent restricted music from being uploaded"

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.

Along that note, you should try searching for "The Beatles" or "Pink Floyd" on Grooveshark.

YouTube does that at great expense and, I believe, partially as the result of a legal settlement, unless I'm mistaken.. Your suggestion would create a one-way ratchet wherein everyone would have to do as much or more than everyone else, in spite of the law or the cost of doing so.

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.

Google is under no obligation to voluntarily remove videos and music from Youtube. They do it themselves, because of whatever compromise they made with the labels. I actually think people should be a lot more outraged about this than they are right now. Google is going out of their way to be stricter than the DMCA demands.