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Comment by fastest963 | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys, I'm an Engineer at Grooveshark and I handle developer relations.

Unfortunately, groovr appears to circumvent internal copyright protections for content hosted at Grooveshark. The groovr library offered a way to get, and subsequently allow you to easily download, song mp3s via a call (groovr.getSongFile). It was able to provide these services by using our internal authentication methods and internal API.

Grooveshark offers a public API (http://developers.grooveshark.com/) which allows you to search for content, authenticate users, view popular music, and more, all for free. Developers are encouraged to register for a key and use our content for their applications.

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> I handle developer relations.

Your tweet[1] says you don't know if anyone reached out to them. Another tweet[2] sure makes it sound like this is a technical issue of how they're doing something, rather than what they're doing.

If you "handle developer relations", why weren't you involved before the notice was sent? Why didn't you reach out to the developers before your lawyers reached out to github?

This does not sound like "handling developer relations".

[1] https://twitter.com/jameshartig/status/337309949317238784

[2] https://twitter.com/jameshartig/status/337336039502934017

OK, so what about the allegation that the developer in question "has taken proprietary source code from inside of our application and posted it as a GitHub project"? Was there any of GrooveShark's actual code that was distributed without permission? Because that's what your lawyer told GitHub in order to get it taken down.

You'll find that fastest963 is posting that boilerplate reply across the web, and then failing to reply to the very question that you ask, which everyone else is asking too.

Grooveshark PR clearly thought that by rolling out a "one of us" developer to make a "shucks, it sucks, but what choice did we have?" type statement, the wider dev community would be pacified and wouldn't keep asking the hard questions.

One day they will learn.

So do I actually read this right... Your companies piss-poor coding practices expose things to the world you don't want to have exposed, and instead of fixing your crappy code you file bogus DMCA requests?

I use your site daily, but don't facilitate wide scale copy right infringement and then go act all buthurt when somebody use your undocumented api. Document it.

Did you draft the DMCA takedown, or order its writing? Who did? Positions if not names. Not just "legal", but who authorized it?

Either way, you must have read it by now and are negligent in being here discussing this if you haven't, so, do you agree with its claims? If not, which ones are wrong?

Was actual proprietary source code taken as the notice claims? Do you guys even know what source code is? How was this source code accessed?

What is the hash of the git repo that contained it, and which lines are yours? (If you need to check, it's okay - there appear to be many new mirrors you could reference.)

This may seem harsh, but you've had someone's website removed and accused them of a crime. Put up or shut-up. In response to this post.

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