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Don't become this guy: http://www.zdnet.com/student-richard-odwyer-spared-us-extrad... Sadly, the Internet isn't our playground anymore. You have to watch what you do even if it's just curating links to things you can download for free.
He won his case and is suing the US now I believe.
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"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.
Or, well, it make not make it "willingly infringement", but it still makes it infringement.
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 operate…
By advertising he is kind of making your argument invalid. "This is the kind of music you can get" should involve some level of analysis to ensure you aren't accidentally listing copyrighted content if you truly want to live under the safe harbor laws.
For instance Youtube makes a best effort in all of its advertising to only show content that is legitimate. If some gets through that is fine, but you should at least spend a bit of time making sure you aren't accidently listing a well known band.
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That's actually incorrect in the US. The default state of a work of art is that it is copyrighted with ownership granted to the creator, with all rights reserved. These rights have to be waived for it to become public domain. http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#102
It's actually difficult to explicitly put your work in the public domain. There are no well-worn routes to doing so.
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.
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.
I wonder how tumbler got away with its shady activity when it first started out.
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.
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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.
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 ha…
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…
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.
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> 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.
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.
If he was clearly toeing the legal line, he would have no legal risk. (Toeing the line means "conforming to the rules".)