Judge Rules Against Grooveshark in Copyright Infringement Case
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
From an ideological point it seems hard to rationalize. We pretty much have an obligation to fix copyright law, build a digital Alexandria, and give it to the world. For Free. All art, movies, music, books, educational materials, everything. Free. We can figure out another way to reward creators without creating artificial marketplaces that demand most go without so the few left have reason to spend.
If we're going to fuck up the climate for later generations - I think we can manage to at least figure this out. It's pretty low hanging fruit from a technical perspective.
The bit about the users is a bit hyperbolic but could also easily be done. They could get rewarded with virtual avatar gear to protest on your lawn for messing with their library.
Part of the reason that Uber and Airbnb have succeeded where other content-based startups have failed is the fact that they are dealing with city-based, rather than federal regulations. As copyright is regulated federally, the only way to fix it is by first fixing the broken system of electoral funding that encourages politicians in DC to follow the money that flows out of the RIAA and similar cashed up lobbying bodies.
It's even worse, copyright is regulated by international treaties[1]. Every time someone comes up with an idea to reform copyright, shorten the terms etc. it's immediately shot down by the argument that we are bound by those agreegments and cannot change anything ourselves.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_parties_to_internationa...
Of course, it's the money. It would be interesting seeing copyright rents by country.
Marijuana legalization is the very same story. Other countries wouldn't do it, fearing the wrath of USA. But now USA states are opening that mellon.
If you do that first, then folks who's IP is to be given away free would more likely be on board with the idea.
As a musician, few things anger me more than when a politician claims to be clamping down on speech to defend my "property."
I think most people now (artists or not) view one's copyrights as real property, and their eventual expiration as an antiquated idea.
I'd argue that we have already. Creating media is expensive, and if you take away the ability for people to monetize media you get rid of a segment who create media for the sake of media. The only people left are those wealthy enough to do so, and are no doubt looking to protect/expand their own profit centers.
The extreme view of this is that now Tarantino can only make his movies as long as he reminds everyone that "he gets the good stuff, Folgers® Brand Coffee, the best part of waking up."
Creating media has never been as cheap as today. My ex roommate has been playing in bands ever since I got to know him. First recordings were done on 6 track tape recorder an replicated to cassette. Then the first, big towers were capable of recording a handful of tracks with low quality. Now, all he needs to go and make solid recordings is a laptop and a semi-professional external sound card. The distribution costs drop to zero on the internet.
The equipment he uses to record is much cheaper than the room they rent for the band and the instruments.
People that create media for the sake of creating media can do so at an unprecedented scale. The issue is with those that want to make a living of being a media creator.
Your point can roughly be paraphrased as the commoditization of media creation processes.
Schumpeter's gale:
""process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.""
He is talking about figuring out another way for creators to monetize their media without artificial restrictions on sharing/copying. He doesn't want to take away money from creators, just the copyright. And i couldn't agree more with this idea.
If its the case you agree with the idea, does that come at the cost where you open up a newspaper and 75% of the articles are actually written by corporations pretending to be journalists?
It should be noted that the current system is working pretty damn well. More content is being created in just about every medium than ever before, and more people are consuming it. Maybe the rewards don't go as much to the artists as they should, but the money flows towards the sorts of media that people actually want to consume, which is something that other systems would find difficult to emulate well.
> most go without so the few left have reason to spend.
I'm not sure this is true. Market segmentation is very successful -- if you don't see a movie in the theatre, you might see it on DVD or Netflix, and if you can't afford that then you can see it on TV later on (and pay for it by watching advertisements.) Ditto music with albums, itunes/spotify/whatever and the radio.
> educational materials
The market hasn't done very well here in the past, I'll grant, but this one is definitely sorting itself out, too. Free textbooks are not popular yet, nor are sites like Coursera, EdX and Udacity, but they're growing.
I don't think that either of these (more content created, and more content consumed) is because the system is working well, but despite the system being horrible. The Internet and digital media enabled many more producers, many more consumers, and it stole power from the intermediaries/distributors . Before the Internet, the distributors of media, you know, actually distributed the content. Nowadays, they only act as gatekeepers and (copyright-enabled) rent-seekers.
Hollywood, which includes the music industry, is very hierarchical. Steve Jobs was not only CEO of Apple. He was also CEO of Pixar. As the head of a major movie studio, he outranked all music executives. He could deal with them as their superior. That got him in the door.
iTunes is now the largest music vendor in the world.
It's ludicrous -- the company had the music rights, movie rights, patents and technical know-how -- but just refused accepting the way the trends were going.
From Pages 54-56 of the decision:
> Here, defendants Tarantino and Greenberg satisfy the criteria for corporate officer liability. Tarantino and Greenberg are the co-founders of Escape. Tarantino is the Chief Executive Officer and Greenberg is the Chief Technology Officer. Together, Tarantino and Greenberg manage all aspects of Escape’s business. They both directed the infringements at issue in the present litigation by: (1) creating a business model that was based upon the unlicensed sharing of copyright protected material; (2) sending written instructions to the entire company requiring employees to operate “seeding points” so that they could launch the Grooveshark P2P Network; (3) creating the Central Music Library and directing employees to upload files to the Library; (4) deciding to launch the Grooveshark Lite streaming service and instructing Escape employees to upload files for that service; and (5) personally uploading copyrighted protected material, Moreover, they both have a substantial equity interest in Groovershark and thus, directly benefit from the infringing activity.
The power of tech and ramping up of robotics is going to bring the pressure of public opinion on us all very soon -- we need to be on the right side of the fence, and so, although I enjoyed the technical capabilities and innovation from Grooveshark, I'm glad they've lost the war.
The founders are still smart and will be able to continue to do great things. They've proven their ability to build/design a functioning, beautiful product and amass an very large audience. Excited to see what is next...
I don't understand this statement, that wasn't the end of the 'war', Grooveshark lost a battle, just like Napster and Limewire were not ends of the 'war'.
Ultimately (as another poster has said) the reason we can get nice things like the Spotify, iTunes and Amazon music services is because people were fighting these battles and winning until the law smacked them down.
I think you should reflect on the first paragraph further, services such as Grooveshark and Uber are skirting the law and users prefer these methods for a reason. Without these disruptions maybe we'd have to buy albums on a USB thumb drive rather than download them over the net.
I agree but i think that current copyright is on the wrong side of the "fence".
We also need a judge somewhere to rule against the shark who hijacked the Groovy codebase and turned it all into something it wasn't originally intended to be - surely that's a copyright infringement. Instead of a specified language with many open source implementations and much documentation as per its creator's vision, it's all being controlled by one corporate with hardly anyone contributing. The project person who makes the announcements is now using his own personal blog instead of the public mailing list to announce new versions, and is trying to replace the open communication channels by soliciting for subscribers to a personal mailout that mostly contains links to tweets.
What about considering the cost of enforcement? Content "creators" in Hollywood and CBS et al offload their enforcement costs to U.S. government agencies which are funded by tax-payers, not those "creators" (though in fact those "creators" are really content copiers most of the time).
The only difference is that the users, on their own, upload much less of their own content on Grooveshark than they do on Youtube. The users are more prone to upload illegal work.
But that seems like an arbitrary reason to make this ruling. It's unfortunate that the law can be so vague and ill-defined, and arbitrarily interpreted, usually to the benefit of larger corporations.
https://gigaom.com/2010/03/18/viacom-google-youtube-founders...
Also, Paul Resnikoff's take on the story: http://www.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2014/09/29/breakin...