How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

I agree, although I think he sort of predisposed me to this attitude right off the bat with the desperate-seeming link to google results that are supposed to prove people called them an "itunes killer" (note: I could not find a single instance of anyone referring to them as an "itunes killer" in any of those results).

So did SeeqPod have some means by which the artists (cough, excuse me) the labels were getting paid? They said they were paying a lot for bandwidth, so they weren't just a search engine, but also a streaming service?

So much this!

Haven't read self glorification like this in a long time.

Beyond that, it simply lacks credibility. I can't imagine that a Warner executive would be stupid enough to tell him that Steve Jobs was behind an unresolved lawsuit. It's even somewhat unbelievable that the executive would be allowed to speak to him, in the first place, without counsel being present.

The whole piece feels like it has some ulterior motive and he's taken the facts and added his own narrative rather than the truth. Perhaps he's trying to get a new venture funded and he believes a glorified retelling of his previous startup will help.

Interesting point! Worth noting that I do think that this is what lawyers _really_ do. They smudge the gray area to their will, and with enough effort, they make some sort of progress towards their client's bidding. Worth noting, even with the existence of Tomahawk and youtube... and napalm indexer, soulseek, and torrentz.eu, I still felt that it was much easier to pay for Spotify than to drill through the tendrils of the Internet. I had time when I was a poor college student/post-college "adult," but I figured semi-efficiently pirating music for 20 years (yes on a 56k modem as well), I'd rather just popcorntime it and go. Where is the popcorntime for music anyway? Does Tomahawk count at this?

I was under the impression that the UI was pretty incidental in most judges' interpretations that platforms used mainly to locate copyrighted material were on shakier ground than platforms which incidentally, and despite ostensibly significant efforts on the part of developers to limit it, could be used to locate copyright material. It's not like Google doesn't get hit by content-provider lawsuits either, it's just that they're big enough to usually get a settlement agreed on favourable terms and far too big to be bankrupted by legal costs, which is a wider and more general problem with litigation.

Ironically I'm writing this listening to YouTube streaming in the background: a far superior free way to locate and listen to music without paying for it than most of the early pirate platforms ever could have hoped to be.

It's the difference between a phone book and a list of phone numbers of meth dealers.

They knew what they were doing was in at best in a legal grey area, and they were making themselves targets. Steve Jobs may or may not (this is second hand hearsay) have been the one to point them out to Warner, but ultimately they made themselves a target and it's not Steve Jobs fault that they failed.

Also, blaming someone who's dead for your company failing and then spending the rest of the post with ridiculous self-aggrandizement shows a serious lack of character, IMHO.

The UI bit is a red herring. The question is the developers' motivation and what actions they encourage a user to take. Design of the UI may be one piece of evidence of that motivation among others.

Fairly clear here: "During one of these breaks I was by myself in the office of the CTO. He came in and we chatted about the state of technology and music. I then thought to ask a question of which the answer would shed light on the real reason behind the litigation and contention technology companies share with old media companies. I asked Howie, why is it that Warner chose to sue SeeqPod? He said that they maintained a short list of companies and we were on top of that list. I then asked how we wound up on the list and at the top. This is when he mentioned that Steve Jobs had held meetings with several labels including Warner and disagreed with streaming music services like SeeqPod and that companies like ours would inhibit a deal between Apple and the labels, so they collectively decided to keep a running list of “problem” companies that need to be “addressed” by Warner. It was at this point I realized we were not in a fight with the labels but in a proxy war waged by Apple against innovative music technology companies."

I found it interesting to see how - if the story is true - your enemies may not be who they appear to be. He thought the labels hated his business whereas they may have actually been quite partial to it in slightly different circumstances. That's useful to know for when your circumstances change.

Maybe modern Xorg config files are not rocket science, but surely you remember the days of manually listing video modes, and trying endless combinations of video drivers. Hell I think you even needed to add special directives to get three button mice to work properly.

Fortunately those days are gone, but you definitely could debug xf86 config files.

He's expressing that he didn't see it coming:

  Even with this knowledge base I failed to pay attention to what I knew was a deep systematic fissure in the financial markets signaled by the fall of Bear Stearns. I was focused on user acquisition, growth and resolving litigation as opposed to revenue, a mistake when the Black Swan appears.

He's not claiming to have the ability to time markets perfectly. He had enough experience where he might have some awareness of the bigger economic and financial picture. He's saying that even people in the financial industry were caught off guard, especially investing professionals who are key to keeping startups funded.

I found this context to be the most interesting part in addition to the role of how companies behaved in an oligopolistic way.

It could also be taken as an argument for greater financial transparency, or recognizing that the stability of the financial sector is another risk to startups and innovation.

He named an engineer at Warner Music as his source.

This is not a very HN comment even if true.

He touches on that when he goes into his background. He worked on a project in the mid 90s that was duplicated by a competitor and sold to Yahoo.

"I then moved to Sun Micro-Electronics (SME) and that’s where I learned one of my most valuable lessons. I began to build and ship the first HTTP-based (yes, this was a thing back then) stock ticker and called it DigitalTrader in 1996 (http://goo.gl/dQzPTC) It was built in Tcl/Tk and Java/Tk. It auto-updated itself and crawled Quote.com and Yahoo for data. Six months later a competitor duplicated it and Yahoo bought them and put us out of business overnight. Lesson learned: realize when you are doing something that is easily duplicated. "

Because in America its only anti-competitive if you can't pay off the people who decide if it is.

Well, reading the article, this guy had an illegal business finding illegal music on the internet for people to play for free they didn't have rights to. A label sued him. The end.

Apple doesn't have much to do with it. They had a legal music business and negotiated to pay the labels, as they should, since the labels own the music rights. They and the labels correctly figured out their competitors were illegal, and they sued.

Should you not be able to sue someone doing something illegal just because they are in the same business as you?

For one, there's no actual evidence that actually happened.

1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.

I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law.

Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option.

If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them.

(Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)

Did Apple 'make' Warner sue anyone? Remember, the labels held most of the cards.. They controlled the content. If Apple had all of this great power over the labels, why did it take so long to get the Beatles? As far as 'more regulation' -- I don't like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. The government uses regulation as a hammer with which to crush companies that don't tie a certain line. Excessive regulation also adds tremendous costs to a company and therefore the consumers. Do you know how big of a legal department is needed just to comply with government regulations? It's a non-trivial cost. I am not saying regulation is bad; I am saying that beyond Sherman, the government ought not be too heavily involved in regulating competition because then only the politically connected or heavy contributors get permission to thrive. Carlos Slim, for example didn't get rich because of a lack of regulation in Mexican telecoms, he became a billionaire because of regulation: Mexico gave him essentially a multi-year head start over potential competitors using regulatory power. The result, Mexican telecom service is highly expensive and of marginal quality. With less regulation other companies could have started offering services sooner and competition would have driven market innovation.

I mean, dude, seriously... what?

by no means I am an apple fan, never owned any of their device (mainly because how they treat their customers, but that's completely different topic) and still living, but - case is clear simple here. Apple paid owners of copyright agreed amount, and startup was stealing this content without anyone's approval. I don't care who gave list to whom, etc. Justice has been done. If you don't like copyright laws, that's again another story altogether. No rocket science...