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Comment by guelo | Hacker News Reader

They were crawling the web for mp3s the same way that Google does. Though admittedly Google hides the mp3s much better nowadays then they used to. And the web is way more balkanized into all these corporate walled gardens so there are fewer free roaming mp3s on random websites as there used to be. But technically it was a search engine the same as Google.

It always bothers me that this area of the law seems to be entirely based on judges' interpretation of the purpose of a UI. A UI is illegal if it guides the user towards the illegal action. If it is possible to perform the illegal action but the user has to put in a little thought into how to accomplish it then the UI is legal. Google can't have a file-type search box with an mp3 option but if users know the right incantation they can achieve the same thing. So we have lawyers telling us how we can build UIs. It seems wrong and like a dangerous slippery slope.

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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.

Do judges count how it is intended to be used? If we are counting only use and not intended use, then this just means that if a bunch of pirates (or worse) are your initial users then you are in the wrong. That sounds absurd (though I could see a lot of people, in tech and otherwise, wanting to make Tor illegal because of one of its predominant uses). But if it is based on intention, it still doesn't differentiate between the technology being intended for legal use that may not different from illegal use, which is no less absurd. Consider a tool that allows pushing apps onto phones. It is intended primarily to allow apps to be pushed, but the tool has no way to check if the user pushing the app onto the phone has the legal right to push the app and the legal right to push software onto the phone in question.

It seems that making this a legal minefield that requires an existing well funded legal department is nothing short of regulatory capture.

that's the thing with judges and jury. (despite what TV show with precedence and such)

nobody knows!

so the law is only slightly just for whoever has the money to keep appealing decisions until they find one they like (and the opponent is out of money to appeal further).

When people think of "copyrighted" material they usually think Songs, Movies etc. However if you stop and think about it most content on the web is copyrighted, from the news articles you search for to images and websites themselves. With that in mind Google also is used "mainly to locate copyrighted material"

Hosted by the copyright holder. A crucial distinction!

And, in the case of websites, _almost always shared with the copyright holders' permission_.

Yes, except those pesky infoboxes.. Google is starting to serve answers right on search result pages, which to me seems a bit murkier.

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.

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?

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.

Even if you can show the intention of the developer was to aid the user in taking a certain action, if that action can be legal in some cases, how can that be held against the developer?

Is a gun scope illegal because it helps a shooter hit their targets where sometimes shooting those targets is an illegal action? Should torrenting be banned because it is often used to transfer illegal files even though there are a lot of legal files in use as well?

The beauty of law being a human institution is you get to look past such fig leaves. Here, the fact that the author billed SeeqPod as a "streaming music startup" tells you all you need to know about whether his service just incidentally facilitated copyright infringement, or was designed to profit from its users' copyright infringement on a mass scale.

Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I don't think "streaming music startup" implies copyright infringement. There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright.

I think this situation might be similar to google/images rather than youtube as others have suggested. Google certainly indexes tons of images which infringe on someone's copyright. Furthermore you can view them directly in google/images.

> There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright.

When you bill your service as a "streaming music service" 99.5% of your users will use it to listen to Taylor Swift, and by billing it as such single apparent inference is that you intend for them to do that. The non-infringing uses are just a fig leaf--something you point to trying to cover up the obvious.

Google Image search is different. People don't primarily use GIS to find images that are hosted on the internet without the copyright owner's permission, nor does Google do anything to market to that use.

> Google Image search is different. People don't primarily use GIS to find images that are hosted on the internet without the copyright owner's permission, nor does Google do anything to market to that use.

I agree with your general interpretation of the case here, but I wouldn't be surprised if the primary use case of GIS actually is copyright infringement: finding images to paste into your Web site, PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or what have you. Google is, interestingly enough, rather silent about what GIS is actually for.

Related is YouTube, which even post-lawsuit-and-Content-ID gets a huge amount of use for music piracy. But it's probably easier for them to argue post-Content-ID that they've done a lot to actively discourage that use.

And notably Google did face the billion dollar lawsuit with Viacom vs YouTube and had to fight for survival under DMCA. The key argument is "knowledge" of copyright material being improperly hosted, the same standard in theory being applied to all these services from Napster to YouTube to Mega.

Good to know that all streaming music is copyrighted and there is no legal music one can stream. Except that isn't the case, and so it goes back to my point. Perhaps he actually meant for it to be used by people streaming all the free, legal, and often hard to find mp3s out there. You can go to OCRemix for a lot of free music, but searching through all the musicians who put out their own song on their own website isn't at all simple without a tool like this.

Compare it to Tor. Lots of legal uses (at least legal in the US, maybe not in the country where one would need something like Tor for said uses). But the majority of its use is for a few illegal activities. Are we to judge intent based off of how the majority of uses use it? Good bye torrenting.

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