

Be careful what you put in an email - kunle
https://om.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/be-careful-what-you-put-in-an-email/

======
code_duck
This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails.

They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful
propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear
for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy'
ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable
contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has
failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing,
from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and
deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to
shake up that industry.

~~~
paulhauggis
"Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts,
they often don't even fulfill the contracts."

VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN?

~~~
billpatrianakos
They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often
times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in
bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting
yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride?

So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a
few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a
kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all
about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like
bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another
company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next
Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo.

So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that
perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of
like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's
mouth.

~~~
gcr
Y Combinator is to VCs as _____ is to record labels.

The people who can fill in that blank will be very rich someday.

~~~
klbarry
Not that rich. The music industry is very small by gross profits. It's
mentioned often here that Apple, Goog, and Microsoft have enough cash hand to
each buy a majority of it.

~~~
gcr
Sure sounds like an interesting project, though. There's tons of room for
bands to grow beyond just iTunes et al.

------
drivingmenuts
Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least
not cause them in the first place).

This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition.

------
nathanb
I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While
drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case,
sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than
you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some
law (patents and copyrights are a minefield).

I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of
this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but
less often than you might think.

~~~
aidenn0
Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work
machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used
against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is
virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you.

~~~
ams6110
I worked at an investment banking company in the 1990s. They did not have
email when I started, but when they adopted Exchange and everyone got a
Windows PC and MS Office, the CIO set a policy that emails would be retained
for 6 months, then purged. I don't know if this would fly today, but I think
the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content of the
messages made it OK at least at that time.

~~~
anamax
> I think the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content
> of the messages made it OK at least at that time.

Nope. If discovery has started, you have to retain even if you otherwise would
have discarded.

That's in addition to any specific statutory requirements wrt the document's
content.

~~~
adgar
I think the implication was that the policy was in place for when they
_weren't_ being sued, so that if they _were_ sued, they could be completely
reasonable in saying they only had 6 months worth of e-mails to provide for
discovery.

------
tompagenet2
Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in
Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different
way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width.

 _Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird_

~~~
benhoyt
Yeah, those are terrible letter shapes. It happens in IE8 on Windows XP for me
too.

------
feralchimp
"Rude reminder that one needs to be very careful when sending emails"...when
one is a shady-ass character up to some shady-ass shit.

This is less of a business plan than it is a hedge fund betting on one side of
a race condition. The bet is that user growth will outpace successful
litigation against the investment.

It would be less ethically problematic if they were doing the piracy
themselves instead of croudsourcing it.

------
nohat
That seems almost intentionally damning. Why would he put that in writing?
This is disappointing because I really like grooveshark's service.

~~~
a3camero
Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible
statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in
discovery!

~~~
refurb
That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are
never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how
everyone else is misinterpreting your words.

~~~
adgar
What context do you think might explain this away, given the content?

~~~
ChrisLTD
What if, right before he wrote that, he said "here's me pretending to be the
evil guy the music execs think I am."

:-)

------
DrJokepu
This wasn't really a secret, many people in the phonographic industry
(including some at the record labels themselves) knew or suspected for quite a
while that Grooveshark's business plan was something like this.

------
huckfinnaafb
Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the
price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair
deception?

~~~
hapless
They weren't licensing anything. They were relying on DMCA safe harbor
provisions to protect them from infringement suits. The problem is that the
executive e-mail indicates plain as day that they were ineligible for that
safe harbor in at least two ways: they knew of and were profiting from
infringement.

Who could have guessed that basing a business on copyright infringement might
get you sued for copyright infringement?

~~~
tantalor
The email says "we use the label’s songs", "the data we got from them", "we
pay them".

This suggests they were getting the label's data from the label and paying the
label.

That seems like a license to me.

~~~
hapless
The e-mail implies that their plan was to knowingly infringe for months/years
_before_ negotiating a license.

They could then use the data gained from (infringing) streaming/uploads as a
bargaining chip while negotiating the license.

~~~
tantalor
I think the email is ambiguously worded.

I read it as, "we license their songs, and then we license the usage data back
to them at a higher rate once it reaches some threshold."

You apparently read it as, "we infringe until we have enough usage data, and
then we negotiate a contract where they pay us."

The few ambiguous parts are,

1\. Whether "we use the label’s songs" means to license or to infringe.

2\. Whether "the data we got from them" is licensed or infringement.

3\. Whether "what we pay them" means what they had paid in license fees up to
that point, or the terms of the negotiated license.

~~~
pyre
You're missing:

    
    
      > we are achieving all this growth without paying
      > a dime to any of the labels
    

and

    
    
      > In our case, we use the label’s songs till
      > we get a 100 (million) uniques
    

Combined these statements make it less ambiguous.

~~~
tantalor
I read "not paying a dime" as referring to their net with the labels

In their business plan, they take a loss for licensing up front, but
eventually net positive by licensing the data back to the labels.

Contrast with, e.g., Spotify, who nets a loss with the labels.

~~~
andylei
if that were the case, why would they then say:

"Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can."

also,

> they take a loss for licensing up front

doesn't seem like the correct interpretation, because they say

"we are achieving all this growth without paying a dime to any of the labels"

~~~
ricardobeat
That's exactly what he meant, they don't pay a dime because they offset it by
selling data.

~~~
scott_s
To me, the phrase "let's keep this quite [sic] as long as we can" implies you
know you're doing something wrong.

~~~
ricardobeat
I don't know about that, but I guess we'll find out soon enough. I'd give them
the benefit of the doubt since this is all on Universal's words, they provide
an amazing service, have license agreements with EMI and lots of smaller
labels.

~~~
res0nat0r
Is there a list somewhere of all of the actual artists Grooveshark has legal
agreements with? I'd love to see the percentage of streams of unlicensed
artists vs. licensed artists and how much each contributes to their total
stream output per month.

------
shill
The 'e' in email is short for 'evidence'. Little known fact.

------
RyanMcGreal
> Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can.

Clearly the lesson here is that you need to spellcheck carefully before
sending out your emails.

------
DevX101
How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails?

~~~
jamesaguilar
Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit,
per standard practice.

------
__abc
Beware what you put in any medium that can be retransmitted without your
permissions :)

------
billpatrianakos
What a dumb move. I'm really interested to know who the recipient was. This
isn't about watching what you write more so than just being judicious about
what information you choose to share and with _whom_ you share it.

That segment of email made the email's author sound condescending and made the
business itself look shady. I personally don't see any problem with that
business model at all but there will be people who read it in a condescending
tone.

One last thing, the spelling. How in the world does anyone who wants to be
taken seriously get away with that sort of spelling? Especially if you're
running a business. Slang and shorthand are for teenage texts, not emails from
high level execs. I'm a high level executive myself. I'm the
CEO/Founder/President of my $20k/yr business that has its office based in my
living room and even _I_ wouldn't let that happen in an email from me or
anyone representing the work I do. The way you speak and write reflects on you
in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a
hillbilly.

~~~
darklajid
Spelling: I for one couldn't parse it. I stumbled a handful of times and just
stopped reading, looked at the comments here instead.

Looked like a kid texting to me.

~~~
billpatrianakos
Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have
an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling.
Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a
bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause
you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is
just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was
a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The
point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of
us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for
it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but
we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close
friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken
seriously. That's my point.

I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects
poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even
if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a
manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine
but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.

------
maeon3
Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them
will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were
accidentally deleted.

------
goodspeller
what a disgrase! can't even spell "quiet"!

