111–120 of 138 posts
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?
> 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.
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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…
He has to capitulate because he's 18, ignorant of the relevant laws, and likely has no money to be thrown away on litigation. He definitely has shallower pockets than the RIAA. In the civil arena in the U.S., that's an automatic loss. Since operating in good faith is apparently untenable, there is no particular reason for anyone to operate in good faith with respect to the RIAA. Thus copyright piracy proliferates. I'…
Let's be real here. You're not operating in good faith when you link to a bunch of major-label content free on the internet. It's implausible that you actually believe that content to be legitimate. Rather, you're looking to profit from a loophole.
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> If you don't know if you can distribute it, you should assume you can't That's 100% wrong. The default state of a work of art is to be in the public domain. Copyright law creates only a limited exception to that general rule.
That's incorrect in any country (167 of them, including most of the west) that signed the Berne Convention ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention ), which makes all works copyright-by-default.
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> If you don't know if you can distribute it, you should assume you can't That's 100% wrong. The default state of a work of art is to be in the public domain. Copyright law creates only a limited exception to that general rule.
Not really. Works are automatically copyrighted upon creation. It's not some limited exception. You cannot assume a work is public domain until proven otherwise. Otherwise you'll be getting a nastygram from the RIAA.
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…
A reasonable* person would have heard of Madonna and would respond to such evidence of infringement in a timely fashion.
* The definition of 'a reasonable person' is a vexed one. While it's popularly understood to mean something like 'a regular Joe/Jill,' and that's good enough for many purposes, it might be more helpful to think of it as 'someone whose behavior could be reasoned ahead of time by a third party.' So if you're running a site dedicated to music, and given that Madonna is one of the most famous music performers in the world, it's logical (reasonable) to assume you would know who she is. OTOH if you were running some antiquarian maps hosting site and someone uploaded a Madonna video there, you might be excused for not appreciating the significance of same in any action for damages.
/NAL
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Google supposed to determine copyright status of arbitrary sites/"links"?
It is not obligated to do that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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 arg…