How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

Post by wuliwong » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 4:19 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #70

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you can show the intention of the developer was to aid the user in taking a certain action, if that action can be legal in some cases, how can that be held against the developer? Is a gun scope illegal because it helps a shooter hit their targets where sometimes shooting those targets is an illegal action? Should torrenting be banned because it is often used to transfer illegal files even though there are a l…

The beauty of law being a human institution is you get to look past such fig leaves. Here, the fact that the author billed SeeqPod as a "streaming music startup" tells you all you need to know about whether his service just incidentally facilitated copyright infringement, or was designed to profit from its users' copyright infringement on a mass scale.

Post by s73v3r » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 4:38 PM UTC

tantalor wrote: post #43

Can somebody with background on the law please explain how this is or isn't an anti-competitive practice? i.e., Warner Bros sues Apple's rival at Apple's request.

Post by pcwalton » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 4:57 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #82

wuliwong wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "streaming music startup" implies copyright infringement. There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright. I think this situation might be similar to google/images rather than youtube as others have suggested. Google certainly indexes tons of images which infringe on someone's copyright. Furthermore you can view them directly in google/images.

> There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright. When you bill your service as a "streaming music service" 99.5% of your users will use it to listen to Taylor Swift, and by billing it as such single apparent inference is that you intend for them to do that. The non-infringing uses are just a fig leaf--something you point to trying to cover up the obvious. Google Image search is differe…

Post by sosborn » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:08 PM UTC

skrowl wrote: post #67

Apple knows that they can't compete in the market, so they try to compete in the courtroom instead. It's the same reason they tried suing Samsung for such frivolous stuff as "icons with rounded rectangles" and "over-scroll rubber banding". That said, HN is pretty much an echo chamber of Apple fans, so you're unlikely to get many here to admit that they do anything wrong.

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2015, 5:36 PM UTC

acqq wrote: post #21

asadhaider wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I built a third party app using their API, I always wondered the reasons for shutting down the site as it just went down one day with along with its API and a vague message on their homepage. They had a web crawler indexing all publicly accessible songs or mp3 files which made up their search, the API let you query this database including a cached version of the song hosted on their servers. They weren't just a searc…

So they were like a "jukebox" for playing the copyrighted content, streaming it themselves, just like Google's YouTube does. The conceptual difference is that the users themselves upload the material to YouTube, whereas SeeqPod cached the content of other sites (like Google search does, albeit not with music and videos). I'm not surprised that they were on the list of "problematic" companies of record companies. It's…