41–50 of 54 posts
50 mil...ouch
If I were to illegally upload a copyrighted work to Prime, iTunes, or Play; would I expose the parent companies to any liability or is the legal onus entirely on me as the user infringing on the TOS?
Two thoughts on this. First: I was an occasional user of Grooveshark, and whenever I used the service (which had a brilliant UI, by the way) I found myself wondering how they could still be operating, given that they weren't licensed by the major labels. It felt like Napster in a web app, only more centralized (and thus, easier to take down, one would think). Well, the answer seems to be that they have been fighting…
I hope that you're logically consistent and also consider other people who make their money by trampling on rights to be gutsy. for instance, gangsters, fraudsters, spammers... all have a similar business model in that they make money by ignoring the legal framework of their chosen business. certainly does take guts!
Big media is far closer to the gangsters you describe than Grooveshark was.if
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To be fair, the same can be said of Uber and Airbnb, both of which are largely praised on HN in the same way.
I disagree strongly that Uber or Airbnb and Grooveshark are comparable.
50 mil...ouch
There have been large settlements in the past that turned out to be false. They want a high number for shock value, but nobody's actually paying it. (There was something to that effect in the sony docs iirc.) See: Hotfile, Isohunt, etc.
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To be fair, the same can be said of Uber and Airbnb, both of which are largely praised on HN in the same way.
I guess gangsters are a species of hacker in a sense
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Isn't that a weird thing to say? You pay for Netflix. Far more so than for Spotify or Rdio, you miss tons of content, so much so that there are regular columns on Slate about what good movies are coming and going from the service every month. Netflix has extraordinarily spotty coverage; it's like a version of Spotify where they have Pixies albums, but only every other song from the albums. The difference in entitleme…
I know exactly what you mean. Perhaps it has something to do with decades of TV being available over the air, and over different varying cable packages. People are used to the idea that if you don't pay for cable you can watch a subset of TV shows, and if you do pay for cable, you're only buying a subset of the channels. Music has always been free on the radio, but it works differently. Multiple radio stations might…
The pop single was a great product in its day. The recording industry invented pop singles and then spent fifty years perfecting the machine to market them.
To focus the marketing, singles were released a few at a time, and radio stations were encouraged [1] to play the same small playlists relentlessly, over and over, day and night. We all got used to the fact that there were only a few hundred songs on the radio and that they weren't merely free, but inescapable.
To further focus the marketing, the audience was relentlessly diced into genres, and high walls were built between the genres. Sorry, no hip-hop here, this is a rock station; Sorry, no zydeco here, this is a country station. We all got used to the fact that each of our local radio stations had a sound that never changed, and that you could name the songs that would be playing in a bar before you walked in. (Hint: Hotel California.)
For a while there, bands would release carefully-crafted albums that were designed to be listened to in a sitting, but the radio would never play whole albums except on very special occasions. Also, long songs would generally be abridged or avoided. We all got used to the fact that music came in randomly-shuffled three-minute chunks, which just happen to be really quick to download and easy to stuff onto USB sticks.
Then Mephistopheles appeared, holding the first compact disc, and the industry's doom was sealed as it realized that it could make an easy fortune by selling the baby boomers' music to them over again in a new format. And, indeed, that fortune was made. The industry's focus shifted to the past, and parked there. They made a lot of money selling copies of Rumours and Dark Side of the Moon to multiple generations of listeners, and they invested in branding juggernauts like Madonna and Michael Jackson that promised to sell albums for the next fifty years, and we all got used to the fact that one could pick up a copy of Rolling Stone and have difficulty figuring out which year it was from.
Plenty of people complained about this system at the time, but it did make money. Until Napster and Apple came along and said "Hey, your entire musical universe fits inside a small box like this, would you like one? It won't take more than a week to build a collection that is better than the radio." And then, whoops, the meteor hit the dinosaur right between the eyes.
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[1] This kind of encouragement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payola .
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I know exactly what you mean. Perhaps it has something to do with decades of TV being available over the air, and over different varying cable packages. People are used to the idea that if you don't pay for cable you can watch a subset of TV shows, and if you do pay for cable, you're only buying a subset of the channels. Music has always been free on the radio, but it works differently. Multiple radio stations might…
My theory continues to be that the music industry is just unlucky. They entered the internet era with a product that was perfectly positioned to be annihilated by Napster, iTunes, and YouTube. The pop single was a great product in its day. The recording industry invented pop singles and then spent fifty years perfecting the machine to market them. To focus the marketing, singles were released a few at a time, and rad…
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I disagree strongly that Uber or Airbnb and Grooveshark are comparable.
Yeah, I tend to find AirBnB and especially Uber worse. Also, Uber seems to be run by sociopaths.
Though, hustling senior citizens with bizarre Wii tennis mastery does make one think.
I'm curious to know what will happen with all the user data on their systems. There was a site floating around which allowed you to access your playlist information just by entering your account email. I assume that was old public data. And with services like this, is there any threat to users who access 'illegal' material?