The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school • Hacker News Board

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#61

Post by tptacek » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:16 PM UTC

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.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#62

Post by gr3yh47 » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:18 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #54

> 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…

none of that is required by the DMCA though

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#63

Post by lukezli » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:21 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #48

_wp3r wrote: post #33

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

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.

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.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#64

Post by justhw » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:43 PM UTC

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.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#65

Post by eugeneross » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:45 PM UTC

justhw wrote: post #64

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.

Great idea! I'd too would be interested in testing it as well.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#66

Post by parham » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #61

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 t…

I doubt it's illegal to embed a track that's been uploaded by the copyright owner, as they can just disable embedding. I'm assuming it becomes illegal if the uploader didn't own the copyright and was uploading the track illegally. This is impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice, YouTube does all it can, if they can't catch this then how can a normal user do so.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#67

Post by raldi » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:52 PM UTC

morrad wrote: post #60

raldi wrote: post #54

> 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…

> 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.

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.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#68

Post by mathattack » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:55 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #61

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 t…

I was thinking the same thing. The website appears to be making it very easy to aid and abet (not in the strict legal sense) piracy. It's very shaky ground.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#69

Post by tptacek » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

btown wrote: post #32

driverdan wrote: post #2

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 conten…

So then if Google happens to index and show a link to 3rd party content, it's also finding the links itself, and is similarly liable?

If Google becomes aware of such a link, for any reason, it is obliged by law to deindex.

Re: The RIAA forced me to shut down a successful website/apps I built in high school

#70

Post by jarrett » Tue, Dec 31, 2013, 6:04 PM UTC

parham wrote: post #66

tptacek wrote: post #61

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 t…

I doubt it's illegal to embed a track that's been uploaded by the copyright owner, as they can just disable embedding. I'm assuming it becomes illegal if the uploader didn't own the copyright and was uploading the track illegally. This is impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice, YouTube does all it can, if they can't catch this then how can a normal user do so.

I haven't seen the case law, but from the following commentary, I'd say the issue isn't so clear-cut:

> However, if the service provider becomes aware of a "red flag" from which infringing activity is apparent, it will lose the limitation of liability if it takes no action. The "red flag" test has both a subjective and an objective element. In determining whether the service provider was aware of a "red flag," the subjective awareness of the service provider of the facts or circumstances in question must be determined. However, in deciding whether those facts or circumstances constitute a "red flag"—in other words, whether infringing activity would have been apparent to a reasonable person operating under the same or similar circumstances— an objective standard should be used.

Source: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-105hrpt551/pdf/CRPT-105hrp...

So, the defense that infringement is "impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice" probably doesn't apply. If the site owner reasonably should have known of the infringement, safe harbor protection is forfeited.

The moral is that you need to be proactive about removing infringing content. Yes, it's true that YouTube doesn't take down every offending video. But they (at least claim to) actively monitor for infringement to the best of their abilities:

http://www.youtube.com/t/video_id_about

Disclaimer: Don't take my advice here as a comprehensive guide to DMCA compliance. My comments are a far cry from that.

Edit: I should add that I'm not offering an opinion as to whether the OP's site violated the DMCA, or whether the RIAA's takedown was valid. My comments were meant to apply generally, not to the OP's specific case.