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

> What I did was simply store links to music files hosted elsewhere on the internet and acted as a conduit for these music files, allowing people to search songs by title/artist and play/create playlists using my interface.

That's exactly why a lot music are not playable on the old turntable.fm. They are blocked even though they are searchable (which talks to various APIs as well?)

For someone who co-ran a popular BBS forum in the past with millions of Chinese users, I and my other admins got a lot of notices and threats to arrest us. I was also in my high school year as well. Just a few years ago. We didn't shut down the site, it still exists and is still pretty popular. We changed our domain name because it was somehow conflicting with another television company's name and we took down certain torrent files at their requests. We still allow people to upload these illegal contents but we just play nice. I guess we weren't the top players like PirateBay so we haven't been told that we must shut down. We just receive notices. But do play nice.

> I spent a lot of time building HypedMusic. I’ve learned a lot of really cool stuff along the way

You should talk to them. You should inform your users about this and think about future plans. Maybe instead of allowing them to search for illegal contents you can play a demo and link to iTune, soundcloud for purchase? If you have a lot of users you should look for partnership. With users, you should come up with new model. It will be tough, but think about it for a moment. Otherwise you have learned a lot by developing an app yourself. That's a plus already.

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.

If you're running a website where DMCA safe harbor protection is important, you'll want to discuss a compliance plan with your company lawyer.

I'm not asking "is it mathematically possible?" I'm asking "do you really think Madonna, or Madonna's agent, uploaded that video?""

Isn't that what record companies do these days? I thought that was the idea behind the Vevo stuff. Between that and Youtube's audio fingerprinting, it seems reasonable to assume that if a pop star's song is on youtube, it is because their record company put it there.