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

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

#81

Post by maxerickson »

seanalltogether wrote: post #17
ds9 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all clear that he's violating any laws. There is no infringement in providing access in a good-faith belief that the content is legit. And it's a fair assumption that the people actually publishing the music files on their websites wouldn't be doing so without authorization from the rights holders. Further, downloading in general (as opposed to publishing) is expressly legal in some countries (e.g., repor…

"There is no infringement in providing access in a good-faith belief that the content is legit." I don't believe that is true. Content distribution is a complicated affair. Redistribution of content is not as easy as saying "well if site xyz has the right to distribute it, so do I"

The argument also hinges on the idea that the operator has "good-faith belief that the content is legit".

Stating that you have this good faith belief is not actually the same thing as having it.

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

#82

Post by 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.

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

#83

Post by jarrett »

parham wrote: post #77
jarrett wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity. It wasn't apparent to them that copyright was being breached so the "red flag" is not apparent to a reasonable entity, i.e. if the embeder is liable so is YouTube. This makes sense but I don't if it would be convincing elsewhere.

> You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity.

That's not how the reasonable person standard works. "Reasonable person" is a term of art. A reasonable person is a sort of thought experiment that's used often in law. We imagine a hypothetical person who is in most respects like the average person, and who makes sound judgments based on the information available to him or her. We then hold real legal entities, such as website proprietors in DMCA cases, to the standard of this hypothetical reasonable person. For example, we say that a reasonable person running such and such website would have noticed copyright infringement, and thus the website's proprietor was obligated to remediate the infringement.

The fact that YouTube has maintained its safe harbor means YouTube is successful in that regard. It doesn't tell us anything about the legal definition of a "reasonable person."

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

jarrett wrote: post #70
parham wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 su…

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by parham »

jarrett wrote: post #83
parham wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity. It wasn't apparent to them that copyright was being breached so the "red flag" is not apparent to a reasonable entity, i.e. if the embeder is liable so is YouTube. This makes sense but I don't if it would be convincing elsewhere.

> You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity. That's not how the reasonable person standard works. "Reasonable person" is a term of art. A reasonable person is a sort of thought experiment that's used often in law. We imagine a hypothetical person who is in most respects like the average person, and who makes sound judgments based on the information availabl…

Oh ok, I guess I have a lot to read up on, would you know any good free sources of case law? and/or anything interesting related to DMCA?

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

#86

Post by logfromblammo »

rayiner wrote: post #72

> 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."

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

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

#87

Post by MichaelGG »

tptacek wrote: post #69
btown wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How is Google supposed to determine copyright status of arbitrary sites/"links"?

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

#88

Post by MichaelGG »

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…

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.

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

#89

Post by dragonwriter »

dragontamer wrote: post #73

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…

> 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.

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

#90

Post by robert-wallis »

NathanKP wrote: post #82

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 Amaz…

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!

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