
The Grooveshark Settlement [pdf] - hxn
http://beckermanlegal.com/Lawyer_Copyright_Internet_Law/umg_escape_150505Settlement.pdf
======
legutierr
Two thoughts on this.

First:

I was an occasional user of Grooveshark, and whenever I used the service
(which had a brilliant UI, by the way) I found myself wondering how they could
still be operating, given that they weren't licensed by the major labels. It
felt like Napster in a web app, only _more centralized_ (and thus, easier to
take down, one would think).

Well, the answer seems to be that they have been fighting the major labels in
the court this whole time (~5 years). Unlike maybe everyone else who has faced
up against the major labels, Grooveshark forced them to fight. When the labels
didn't give them a licensing deal, and told them to stop operating,
Grooveshark responded, "Make us."

They created their tech, built a loyal following, grew their business, all the
while fighting this lawsuit. In the end, the only thing that stopped them from
pursuing their vision was a judges' order. This settlement seems to be a
judge-mediated settlement of only the damages portion of the trial after
liability had been established. It seems that the judge ruled against
Grooveshark by summary judgement in September, which means they have known for
more than 7 months that this was inevitable. They shut down their service 2
days ago.

People have called Grooveshark "shady", and many people believe that their
business model was "illegal". Both adjectives may be accurate descriptions. I
think the best adjective to describe these guys, however, is "gutsy".

Second:

The front-end system that Grooveshark built, which is the best that I have
used for music playback and discovery, is now jointly owned by the major
labels. They cannot possibly be short-sighted enough just to throw that away.
Will we see Grooveshark resurrected as a label-owed alternative to Spotify, et
al? Will they try to maintain any portion of the Grooveshark organization,
especially the engineering team? Again, they would be foolish not to try,
although maybe I'm giving them too much credit.

~~~
oldmanjay
I hope that you're logically consistent and also consider other people who
make their money by trampling on rights to be gutsy. for instance, gangsters,
fraudsters, spammers... all have a similar business model in that they make
money by ignoring the legal framework of their chosen business. certainly does
take guts!

~~~
mdorazio
To be fair, the same can be said of Uber and Airbnb, both of which are largely
praised on HN in the same way.

~~~
whichfawkes
How are those services trampling on anyone's rights?

Despite loving Grooveshark, I tend to agree that copyright has some meaning
and purpose. I don't think taxi companies have a right to business just
because they were there first.

~~~
tptacek
The subtext is that they're pushing on and in many cases breaking regulations
(on carriage service and short-term tenancy), and also externalizing their
costs. I happen to believe that's actually true in both cases, but that
doesn't make what they're doing equivalent to building a business on someone
else's proprietary IP.

~~~
chimeracoder
> I happen to believe that's actually true in both cases, but that doesn't
> make what they're doing equivalent to building a business on someone else's
> proprietary IP.

Drop the "intellectual" part of "intellectual property" and that's exactly
what AirBNB is doing - tenants are literally using property that isn't theirs
(they've leased it, but they don't own it)[0] and are making money off it.

And in doing so, they are also impacting others' property rights, since the
externalities of short-term tenancy are borne by neighbors, not by the person
who lists a whole-apartment rental on AirBNB.

[0] And given how hard the music industry has been pushing the line "you don't
own the music you buy; you're only leasing rights to access it" for digital
downloads (not just streaming), this isn't really that different a situation.

~~~
tptacek
I agree, but that part of Airbnb's usage pattern is bound to change, and the
service will easily survive that change. Grooveshark, on the other hand, can't
survive a correction from proscribed uses.

------
FreakyT
It's really unfortunate that they were taken down. Sure, there exist paid
services like Spotify, but when there's only licensable content you miss out
on all weird obscure stuff that Grooveshark had, like video game soundtracks,
chiptunes, and international music not licensed abroad.

If only every one of these large record labels could just instantly go out of
business, simultaneously. That would be wonderful...

~~~
whichfawkes
I'd be perfectly happy to pay for music streaming like I pay for Netflix:
unlimited access for a flat monthly fee. However, I'm not willing to pay for a
monthly service from every individual record label I want to listen to, and
_still_ miss out on content I want.

Unfortunately, I don't think it's very likely that a paid service which
behaves in a more legitimate way than Grooveshark can really have all of the
content in one place, because of all of the agreements necessary.

For some reason I don't mind Netflix having only a subset of TV shows and
movies, but I would mind a music service that doesn't have a nearly-complete
catalog of everything I might want. I don't want to have to care what label
owns the tracks. Perhaps I'm just spoiled by having Grooveshark for so long.

~~~
tptacek
Isn't that a weird thing to say? You pay for Netflix. Far more so than for
Spotify or Rdio, you miss _tons_ of content, so much so that there are regular
columns on Slate about what good movies are coming and going from the service
every month. Netflix has extraordinarily spotty coverage; it's like a version
of Spotify where they have Pixies albums, but only every other song from the
albums.

The difference in entitlement (I don't mean that as a loaded term) between
music and video services is interesting to me.

~~~
whichfawkes
I know exactly what you mean.

Perhaps it has something to do with decades of TV being available over the
air, and over different varying cable packages. People are used to the idea
that if you don't pay for cable you can watch a subset of TV shows, and if you
do pay for cable, you're only buying a subset of the channels.

Music has always been free on the radio, but it works differently. Multiple
radio stations might play the same song if it's within their genre. This is in
contrast to multiple TV stations which own non-overlapping programming. You
can't find ABC programming on CBS, but you can hear the Pixies on multiple
radio stations.

To rephrase a little: Television content distribution has always been linked
to the owner of the content. The networks that buy the programs distribute
them exclusively. Music distribution is often separate from the ownership, and
is based on royalties. Anyone can play any music, as long as they pay the
royalties. As such, nobody is used to having to think about who owns the work
of a certain artist they want to listen to.

~~~
mechanical_fish
My theory continues to be that the music industry is just unlucky. They
entered the internet era with a product that was perfectly positioned to be
annihilated by Napster, iTunes, and YouTube.

The pop single was a great product in its day. The recording industry invented
pop singles and then spent fifty years perfecting the machine to market them.

To focus the marketing, singles were released a few at a time, and radio
stations were encouraged [1] to play the same small playlists relentlessly,
over and over, day and night. We all got used to the fact that there were only
a few hundred songs on the radio and that they weren't merely free, but
inescapable.

To further focus the marketing, the audience was relentlessly diced into
genres, and high walls were built between the genres. Sorry, no hip-hop here,
this is a rock station; Sorry, no zydeco here, this is a country station. We
all got used to the fact that each of our local radio stations had a sound
that never changed, and that you could name the songs that would be playing in
a bar before you walked in. (Hint: _Hotel California_.)

For a while there, bands would release carefully-crafted albums that were
designed to be listened to in a sitting, but the radio would never play whole
albums except on very special occasions. Also, long songs would generally be
abridged or avoided. We all got used to the fact that music came in randomly-
shuffled three-minute chunks, which just happen to be really quick to download
and easy to stuff onto USB sticks.

Then Mephistopheles appeared, holding the first compact disc, and the
industry's doom was sealed as it realized that it could make an easy fortune
by selling the baby boomers' music to them over again in a new format. And,
indeed, that fortune was made. The industry's focus shifted to the past, and
parked there. They made a lot of money selling copies of _Rumours_ and _Dark
Side of the Moon_ to multiple generations of listeners, and they invested in
branding juggernauts like Madonna and Michael Jackson that promised to sell
albums for the next fifty years, and we all got used to the fact that one
could pick up a copy of _Rolling Stone_ and have difficulty figuring out which
year it was from.

Plenty of people complained about this system at the time, but it did make
money. Until Napster and Apple came along and said "Hey, your entire musical
universe fits inside a small box like this, would you like one? It won't take
more than a week to build a collection that is better than the radio." And
then, whoops, the meteor hit the dinosaur right between the eyes.

\---

[1] This kind of encouragement:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola) .

~~~
tptacek
It's "Rumours". If you're going to make a mom-rock jab at Fleetwood Mac, get
the spelling right. :P

~~~
mechanical_fish
Fixed.

Don't get me wrong, I own and rather like _Rumours_ , though I cannot spell
it. It helps that, after spending a decade mostly not listening to classic-
rock radio, I can hear the thing with fresher ears.

------
Osaka
I'm curious to know what will happen with all the user data on their systems.
There was a site floating around which allowed you to access your playlist
information just by entering your account email. I assume that was old public
data.

And with services like this, is there any threat to users who access 'illegal'
material?

~~~
detaro
I thought I read that the site pulled the info from the browser's local
storage.

EDIT: which they obviously shouldn't be able to do. So they probably scraped
it, right.

~~~
rawnlq
A different domain can't possibly access the local storage for grooveshark.com
right?

~~~
detaro
Good point. People discussed different ways to get to the parts stored in
localstorage, but that obviously only should work locally. Since Groovebackup
got shutdown as well we can't check what they did.

~~~
forthefuture
You can still go to grooveshark.com and see your localStorage.

------
Vintila
I find it interesting that by virtue of point 5, they are not allowed to open
source anything related to Grooveshark. Unless I'm interpreting it wrong.

~~~
radley
You're not. It's to prevent Grooveshark from becoming the next Popcorn Time.

------
acaloiar
Can anyone comment on the potential implications for Apple iTunes, Google Play
Music, and Amazon Prime Music? Each of these services allow users to upload
content from their personal libraries. As far as I know, these services make
no technological effort to assert the users' ownership of the content. Rather,
I assume their Terms of Service mandate content ownership prior to uploading.
Do their TOSs protect them from the complaint levied by the Plaintiffs in the
Groovershark case stating that Groovershark was: "liable for direct and
secondary infringement of certain of the Plaintiffs' copyrighted works;". Was
Grooveshark's TOS materially different than that of the services mentioned
above?

If I were to illegally upload a copyrighted work to Prime, iTunes, or Play;
would I expose the parent companies to any liability or is the legal onus
entirely on me as the user infringing on the TOS?

------
therobot24
50 mil...ouch

~~~
ikeboy
There have been large settlements in the past that turned out to be false.
They want a high number for shock value, but nobody's actually paying it.
(There was something to that effect in the sony docs iirc.) See: Hotfile,
Isohunt, etc.

~~~
idyllicshine
Sounds like a player getting eliminated at the end of a Monopoly game when one
owes a lot of money and goes bankrupt.

------
arihant
The message they posted a day before this settlement -
[http://grooveshark.com/](http://grooveshark.com/)

I'm confused, didn't Grooveshark just provided aggregation and a streaming
player with playlist management? The music was not hosted by Grooveshark
right?

~~~
LiquidFlux
I thought you could upload to Grooveshark.

~~~
JensenDied
You could, I've uploaded stuff from some bands home burned demo discs before.
I probably don't have access to any of that stuff anywhere now.

------
darylyu
Is there a tl;dr version in simple English?

