
The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school - lukezli
http://blog.appgrounds.com/the-riaa-forced-me-to-shut-down/
======
tptacek
There are two major components to DMCA safe-harbor compliance. The first is
that you honor takedown requests; unfortunately for software entrepreneurs,
this seems to be the only DMCA component that is widely understood.

The second major component is that you not operate your service with direct
knowledge of infringement. A simple way to illustrate this is that if you have
a screenshot of your application being used to play Madonna tracks, you are
obligated to hunt down those tracks and remove them yourself. If it can be
shown that you purposefully don't do that, you can end up forfeiting safe-
harbor.

You are probably happier in the long run for shutting this project down. While
you clearly want to believe that you aren't infringing copyright, which is an
admirable sentiment, you obviously aren't taking advantage of "fair use" by
giving your users direct access to copyrighted music under your own branding.

~~~
MichaelGG
What if I've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort of
pop-knowledge into itself? If I see a screenshot of an apparently home-made
video am I supposed to think "small band that probably intentionally released
this video to get more attention = OK" or "probably a filter added by a
popular band that doesn't need more attention = Remove"?

This is ignoring jurisdiction, too. IIRC, AllOfMp3 operated for a while since
in Russia they could buy a blanket copyright licensed and successfully used
that to legally make sales until Visa illegally turned off payment and finally
the Russian government got them to acquiesce. Yet the site was legal, despite
everyone else accusing it of infringement.

Edit: Also, yes, perhaps the law is saying "well if you really knew" and
leaving it to the courts. But there's also cases of where Viacom uploaded
content, then sued over it, not knowing they themselves had uploaded (and
hence licensed it) to YouTube.

~~~
URSpider94
_What if I 've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort
of pop-knowledge into itself?_

No, but the fact that the site owner is using these screenshots to advertise
his service obligates him to do due diligence on the copyright status of those
tracks. Coincidentally picking one of the most popular artists of the last
quarter-century to promote your site rings a little hollow.

Your jurisdictional argument also doesn't hold water. First of all, the site
owner was operating in the USA, so he's bound by US law. Second, buying a
"blanket copyright" in Russia doesn't confer rights to sell content in other
countries.

~~~
perlpimp
If someone buys content from russia they are dealing with russian entitiy not
with US one. Given that he can probably shore up some sort of company and do
business through that via appointed trustee.

------
lukezli
Since I'm lucky enough to be on the front page of HN (thanks a lot!) I'd just
like to shamelessly self promote and say 1) I'm looking for an internship this
summer at a startup- please let me know if any of you have open positions!
Please email me at lukezli[at]yahoo.com. 2) Check out my new project,
catchyurl.co, a url shortener that creates memorable shortened urls like
catchyurl.co/EskimoHill

Let me know if you have any questions for me- hope the blog doesn't crash!

~~~
exDM69
I think you learned a valuable lesson here, you should not try to create apps
that work with the music industry if you don't have some sort of licensing
agreement with them.

It doesn't really matter if it is strictly legal (under DMCA and other
relevant legislation) or not, they can and will use lawyers to intimidate
and/or sue you. It doesn't matter if you're linking to third party hosting or
what the technicalities are, if your app can play back music or video that is
"owned" by the big players (RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA) you are under threat.

You made the right choice (thinking practically, not necessarily morally) in
not trying your luck in court, you have very little chances of winning and
could possibly ruin your future by having a nasty lawsuit on your records.

I don't think it is fair or approve of it but that's the way it works,
unfortunately. Google and YouTube can get away with it, not because of DMCA
and other laws but because they have (secret?) treaties with the copyright
holding parties.

~~~
w0rd-driven
What you're basically saying, and I sadly have to agree: Don't make an app
that works with the music industry.

There was no need for any more words. Where would the music industry be today
without any of the apps that currently have a licensing agreement? No music in
Youtube videos. No Pandoras or Spotify or iTunes even. What would that
internet even look like?

I just find it really odd that an entire industry seems to live to bite the
hands that feed it. I may be entirely wrong in my assessment, so I'll take
whatever licks may come.

As a developer first and a hopeful musician second, one who deeply wishes
those roles were reversed, I have to always stop myself when I think of a
clever idea revolving around music. It has to have such a rigid constraint
that it is almost worthless to continue any endeavor.

------
driverdan
IANAL. First of all a cease and desist doesn't require you to do anything.
It's merely a threat. That said it seems pretty clear that you're violating
copyright laws. The DMCA only applies to user generated content (UGC). You're
not letting users input their own links to 3rd party content, you're finding
the links yourself. It doesn't matter where _you_ get them from. Not only that
but you're not linking to this content on other sites, you're actively playing
it for users within your app.

It's very cool you built this in HS. Let the whole thing be a good lesson in
building apps and dealing with the law.

~~~
langarto
I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of
copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything. He is just pointing
to other sources doing the actual distribution (which may be legal). He is
just providing links, although with a nice interface.

~~~
wernercd
The same way ThePirateBay is guilty of infringement when all the host is
"links". They host "nothing" and yet are the scourge of the interwebs.

~~~
seiji
The brilliant fact of magnet links is even when TPB goes down, you can ask
Google for a cache of a TPB page. The cache of the page still has functional
magnet links.

------
raldi
_> I was under the impression that what I was doing was legal, protected under
DMCA’s fair use policy, which by practice is what makes sites like Youtube
legal: although they host millions of illegal content uploaded by users, as
long as they agree to take down said videos when requested by copyright
owners, they are in the clear because it is difficult/impossible to monitor
what gets uploaded to their sites._

Actually, YouTube doesn't just passively sit around waiting for copyright
holders to whack each mole one at a time; it has an incredibly sophisticated
and powerful content-matching engine that _does_ monitor what's being
uploaded, and automatically checks new videos against a giant corpus of known
copyrighted works.

There's a cool video about it here:

[https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en](https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en)

~~~
morrad
> it has an incredibly sophisticated and powerful content-matching engine that
> does monitor what's being uploaded, and automatically checks new videos
> against a giant corpus of known copyrighted works

This is above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA though. Doing this isn't
what makes Youtube legal, it just attempts to appease copyright holders.

~~~
raldi
That's a dangerous oversimplification. Read about the billion-dollar Viacom /
YouTube lawsuit, and how it was anything but a sure thing that YouTube would
win, despite their DMCA protections.

~~~
horseapples
Lawsuit came before DMCA. Lawsuit was filled in 97 and 98 was when DMCA was
passed.

~~~
dangrossman
Viacom v YouTube was filed in 2007. YouTube didn't exist in 1997; it was
founded in 2005. 1997 was before Napster even.

~~~
horseapples
My bad, no ideas what I was thinking.

------
gedrap
I had a bit similar experience. When I was 16 (so around 2008), I had a poker
blog, just translating stuff from wikipedia and posting some random 'news'. It
was in Lithuania (EU). A small blog, with about 300 daily visitors. A few
months later, I got a letter from the government telling me that I was
infringing some ambiguously worded gambling law. And they were requesting an
official explanation what was I doing (I guess they just reworded testimony).

The idea was that you can blog about poker only if you are a licensed gambling
company, and I was facing a fine of $2500-7000 (the blog had $0.00 income, and
for the contrast, my parents were earning $1000/mo combined). It felt
extremely unfair.

It scared the shit out of me. I had to go to the police station, didn't
contact any lawyer, and wrote my 'explanation' telling that I was not making
any money and did publish publicly available information and I am sorry.

After a month of sleepless nights, I got a letter saying that they decided not
to take any further action and that's a warning. Well, it fucking warned me
big time.

------
rayiner
> The website/apps I’m talking about was called HypedMusic, which provided an
> interface to listen to free, unlimited music, create playlists, and share
> said playlists with your friends on the website or Android and iPhone apps.

Rephrased to be more accurate:

"I built a website where 99.9% of the value provided came from someone else's
investment and work which I used without compensating them."

~~~
logfromblammo
When you put it that way, it seems clear that this kid should be working on
Wall Street.

------
vonskippy
Never take legal threats via email.

If they can't have a lawyer, send via certified mail (yes, snail mail)
specifying the actual complaint, and the legal justification behind said
complain, then just ignore them.

------
mathrawka
And 17 years ago an indie emo record label in NY (that should be enough to
identify them/him) forced me to shut down a website I built.

That was when I left emo and went to mathrock.

~~~
lcasela
You should get into midwest emo.

~~~
mathrawka
I was ;) The band was trying to go national, which is why they signed up on a
NY label.

~~~
lcasela
Oooh.

------
daemonk
I am not a fan of aggressive, litigious companies. And the morality of
physical vs intellectual property is a whole another issue that warrants more
discussion.

However, all that baggage aside, you kinda did create this website so people
can share copyright infringing files. Did you really expect people to only
share personal, non-copyrighted music? Come on.

Anyways. You should be proud of the work you've done though. It's not easy to
follow through with an idea.

------
Kiro
Their reply looks like a template so I'm not sure they even read your email.

------
dragontamer
An important note here, is that if you don't have a lawyer, people can
threaten to sue you for anything. In this case, he had no lawyer, he had no
legal counsel at all.

Granted, part of his legal counsel would be to determine whether or not what
he was doing was legal or not. Obviously, he didn't want to test that out in
front of a judge (who could blame him?), or against the RIAA's well paid
lawyers.

But if you are going to build a business, even on what you believe is on firm
legal grounds... you should have a legal team ready to back you up. Anyone can
threaten you with anything in the US due to how tort law works. Only if you
are willing to have your cases tested in actual courts will you have any
protection at all.

~~~
dragonwriter
> An important note here, is that if you don't have a lawyer, people can
> threaten to sue you for anything.

People can threaten to sue you for anything if you _do_ have a lawyer, too.

A lawyer obviously helps evaluate the threats.

~~~
dragontamer
They can _threaten_ to sue you, but only a lawyer is really qualified to tell
you whether or not the threats are proper.

In this case, the original poster is clearly toeing the legal line. IANAL, but
it sounds like what he's doing is perfectly legal.

Either way, if he cares about his website, he should seek legal counsel.

~~~
dragonwriter
> In this case, the original poster is clearly toeing the legal line.

If he was _clearly_ toeing the legal line, he would have no legal risk. (
_Toeing the line_ means "conforming to the rules".)

------
frankydp
If HypedMusic had offered to provide a mechanism to remove the "infringing"
links wouldn't HypedMusic have been in compliance with Safe Harbor?

~~~
rhino369
Not if you know you are collecting a bunch of copyrighted material. Piratebay
can't use the safe harbor because they are clearly running a sharing site.

Also, the author suggests he was getting the links manually and posting them.
That's definitely not covered.

~~~
lukezli
Hey, just wanted to clarify- I was not manually getting links and posting
them. When someone posted a search query on my website, I would use 3rd party
APIs and run the same search query on those APIs, then return results from
those APIs to the users. All done programmatically.

------
CassieTFC
The music industry as we know it is dead. As someone with a history in the
industry, it is time to discover and embrace the new music model...whatever
that may be. And there are many things it might be. Streaming, yes. The end of
downloads? I don't think so but maybe. The ability for deserving artists
without the backing of the major-label machine to have a measurable amount of
success. Stay tuned ;)

------
justhw
Great read Luke! Any chance you could opensource the project? I've got music
that I've the right to and would love to test it.

~~~
TylerE
I wonder if that could be considered contributory infringement...

~~~
justhw
Why? I have the right to the audio.

------
NathanKP
First of all I'm sorry to hear that you have to shut down your app, but I'm
confident that things are going to work out just fine for you.

I actually had a very similar experience when I was 18 as well. I decided to
make a book search engine that would aggregate reviews from different sources
across the web and provide a high quality, clean interface to quickly see
information about a book and links to buy it on Amazon. The problem my service
solved is that the Amazon interface is extremely ugly, and while I'm sure it
is fine tuned for maximum sales it is definitely highly lacking in aesthetics
and is cluttered with a lot of garbage. My goal was to create the cleanest,
most minimal but extremely useful book search engine.

In retrospect my service was breaking many TOS because of the way it worked.
When someone entered a book title or author name it would utilize Amazon API's
to get information about relevant books that matched the query, then it would
scrape book information from Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Nobles, and the New
York Times sunday book review among other sources, then it would cache that
scraped information in my own database for future reference.

I justified this to myself by thinking it was okay because I was remixing the
information to generate my own summary pages that were cleaner and more
useful, but the reality is that I was pretty much parasitizing these other
services to build my own database.

At its peak my service had many GB's of scraped data from other sites and was
getting about 5000 searches a day which was netting me about $500-$700 a month
from commission on Amazon referrals sales. But after I started getting some
press coverage in The Next Web, etc all the services that I was utilizing
started sending me cease and desist notices. People used my site because it
was cleaner and nicer than Amazon but Amazon didn't appreciate that I was
scraping their content to build my own site so they cut off my API access and
closed my Amazon Associate account.

In the end it was a wild six month ride in which I made a few thousand dollars
but more importantly got tons of experience in coding a scalable site, and
best of all I started getting a lot of job offers. At one point I was getting
three or four job offers a month from different startups from the HN
community.

Eventually I decided to settle down at one of them where I could continue
developing my coding skills. Things turned out very well, and the ride of
personal growth and discovery isn't over for me yet. Every day I get to code
interesting things for my current startup company and this time its a
legitimate business that isn't going to get shut down for stealing content.

Even though you probably feel very disappointed about having to shut down your
service like I did when I had to shut down mine, you can be confident that
with your skills things will turn out just fine for you, and a lot of
interesting startup companies will probably be eager to employ you.

~~~
robert-wallis
So glad you posted this, I was doing something similar and gave up on the idea
because I noticed Amazon doesn't even want you keeping their ASINs in a
database. But I kept thinking maybe I'm just being paranoid and they wouldn't
care.

Glad you made some money off the dev time you put in!

------
shiftpgdn
It's a shame you shut it down. You could have easily gotten a sizeable sum of
money for something like that on Flippa.

------
snake_plissken
Mehh the grey areas of the DCMA grind my gears. Aggregation services do not
host and (for the most part) they do not upload the content.

Your situation is unfortunate kiddo. If you had a couple million or a high
powered law firm on retainer, I doubt you'd have ever received this letter.
But keep up the good work!

------
tootie
Did you not consider hiring a lawyer? I know they cost money, but this sounds
like it was a major investment of time for you. If you want it to ever be a
successful business, you'd eventually have to put money into it. How did you
pay for hosting?

~~~
dangrossman
There's a big difference between a 15 year old coming up with $3/month for
hosting, and coming up with $300/hour to be told you misunderstood the DMCA
and aren't protected.

------
eyeareque
Sure, he had to kill his project but I can only imagine the experience will
help him land new opportunities.

------
yason
So, how many levels of indirection are allowed until a "link" becomes legal
and not infringing?

This is just crazy.

------
relaxitup
@lukezli any thoughts on opening or providing the source for catchyurl? Looks
great!

------
poopsintub
I wonder how tumbler got away with its shady activity when it first started
out.

~~~
dragontamer
They probably had a lawyer advice them on which threats were substantial, and
which ones weren't.

The RIAA is famous for sending out threats on anyone or anything that remotely
does anything they disagree with. They don't necessarily even have a legal
argument to win the case. But they have their lawyers write up nasty letters
and emails to coerce you into doing what they want.

Without a lawyer of your own, who can sift through these C&D letters... you're
pretty much defenseless.

\--------------

More realistically... the Youtube / Tumbler approach was most likely "Ignore
the Letters, and hope for the best". These kinds of letters aren't necessarily
threatening legal action.

------
vaadu
Move or sell the apps into a country not bound by the DMCA.

------
belluchan
I really liked using your app and am sorry to see it go. :(

------
nitin1213
Why's that your username in a different colour?:)

~~~
citricsquid
The green username indicates that the user is new.

~~~
nitin1213
Oh i did not know that sorry.

