Google and Microsoft Sued By Mini Music Label 105
carre4 writes "Blue Destiny Records has sued both Google and Microsoft for allegedly 'facilitating and enabling' distribution of copyrighted songs illegally. The suit alleges that RapidShare runs 'a distribution center for unlawful copies of copyrighted works.' RapidShare is helped by Google and Microsoft, which benefit from the ad relationships, according to the suit. Blue Destiny has attempted to link to pages with RapidShare links to their music via DMCA takedown notices, and Google has, apparently, not complied, while Microsoft's Bing site has removed the links. RapidShare, for its part, is based outside of the US and does not accept DMCA notices."
Remove the Internet. (Score:1, Insightful)
Changing the order around a little here...
So, what lesson should we take away from this?
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Blue Destiny's lawyer doesn't have any ethics?
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99.999% of the time a lawyer's ethic is entirely "If I'm being paid by the client it is ethical to act in his self described best interests".
Re:Remove the Internet. (Score:4, Insightful)
Only a lawyer would claim that.
Anyone else would point out that in the real world, clients defer to the advice of lawyers when deciding what is in their best interest, and lawyers ensure that whatever the client *thinks* is in their best interest, is in fact the course of action that yields the highest number of billable hours.
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Only a lawyer would claim that.
Anyone else would point out that in the real world, clients defer to the advice of lawyers when deciding what is in their best interest, and lawyers ensure that whatever the client *thinks* is in their best interest, is in fact the course of action that yields the highest number of billable hours.
Exactly. Fixed:
If I'm being paid by the client it is ethical to act in his self described best interests, as long as possible, because money buys stuff, like ethics and luxury cars.
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that really only happens in corporate law, or with those specialists who can command top dollar from clients that have piles of money. Not every lawyer is rich, or has clients that are rich. For work like divorces, real estate transactions, wills, etc, you charge what the market will bear (and these days the market bears less and less) and make your practice as efficient as possible. Even in the corporate law world, the trend is shifting away from the billable hour, to billing flat rate for work, where the
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Blue Destiny Records: Hey Rapidshare. We saw that somebody uploaded a few songs without our permission. We have copyright on them. Could you maybe remove them for us please? If you could do that than we would be very grateful for that.
Rapidshare: Hey what a kind email. I suppose we could notify the uploader and take it down.
But this happened instead:
Blue Destiny Records: Hey you fothermuckers! You got our copyrighted material on your website! Take it the fsck down or we will sue you!
Rapidshare: Pardon? Fsck
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Sue Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
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While it does have non-infringing uses I'd also say 90%+ of all illegal file-sharing is done with electricity from power companies.
They can afford to bail out the RIAA too.
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I think 4 would work. After that, everyone would lose all taste for music, and piracy would stop.
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But remember that people were all created by God. Thus, Blue Destiny staff should all jump off a cliff in order to expedite their meeting him to take up the issue.
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oh dear. anything about any os.. or any console.. or any law..
i see what you mean. my post would be the first to deserve one for even bringing it up :P
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You've just given me an idea.
If you're insanely rich, and your lawyer is insanely greedy, you can pay them to preceed you in arriving at the pearly gates in order to be there to plead your case for you.
I didn't say it was a good idea,I just said it was an idea.
Sue the White Pages (Score:5, Insightful)
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Of course not.
He should sue the paper company that makes the paper of the White Pages.
Or the one that makes the ink, whichever has more money.
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If the publisher who puts out the book received a percentage of the spoils from the robbery, then probably.
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If the publisher who puts out the book received a percentage of the spoils from the robbery, then probably.
Except that's not the case here. This is more akin to a the robber having to pay for his copy of the White Pages, as well as possibly paying to have his number listed in the "for sale" section of the Yellow Pages.
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If the publisher who puts out the book received a percentage of the spoils from the robbery, then probably.
If the publisher (Google, Bing) has no knowledge of the crime, it's rather hard to make the claim that the publisher is an accessory.
And since these guys are dumb enough to file in a US Court, the DMCA exemptions and requirements makes all their claims go away.
Anyways, here's the case: BLUES DESTINY RECORDS, LLC v. GOOGLE, INC. et al
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/florida/flndce/3:2009cv00538/56427/1/ [justia.com]
And here are the search terms being complained about:
"Roy Powers Firing Line"
"Peter McG
The DMCA does *not* make the case go away (Score:3, Interesting)
I actually had the misfortune to have to send google a takedown notice after our neighborhood's property manager put some of our newsletters online at a public place (they were already available on a different website via password). I got the idiot property manager to take them down (but only after threatening him with going to the state board of realtors for violating his fiduciary duty), but google was actually a *lot* harder. In the end, I was
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Yes, it's Google's problem that you don't know how to use robots.txt.
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Please go back and read #30415338 [slashdot.org] again.
Here, I'll make it easy for you:
"... after our neighborhood's property manager put some of our newsletters online at a public place"
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What if the thing robbed was a very long prime number written in the front door which the robber memorized? We are supposing this thief did that because he is an appassionato of very long prime numbers, not because he intended to sell the number.
(I'm just taking the analogy to it's logical extreme)
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Google gets revenue from searches by displaying ads and by sponsored links.
The White Pages does the same thing.
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Not quite. Google gets revenue from displaying ads on sites they direct people to through their searches. You might see some ads on the search page, but the real kicker is getting you into a site where there are 10 more ads and every time you click something in that site there are 10 more. I'd say there is at least a five-to-one ratio between search ads and web site ads in terms of revenue.
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No. Google charges MUCH less for Content Network ads than Search ads.
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Nice to know, but still relatively insignificant (as was cdrguru’s claim). The key is, they profit from them. How then is it significantly different from the White Pages’ business model? It isn’t. In any case, it’s absurd to blame the search engine for content when all it’s done is categorize and index said content. If they’re made aware of fraudulent pages, then sure, they can de-list them, but if they’re not aware of them yet then there’s nothing they can do
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A percentage? You're mistaken, Google doesn't get a percentage, it gets paid upfront a set fee for serving keywords. What if you got that information from calling 411 instead and just paid 50 cents upfront for you to get that information? Are you saying 411 should be held liable.
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if there was an entry in the white pages saying "Houses that are empty this weekend, and location of keys"
So tell me, where's the "illegal filesharing links" Google search filter?
Norsefire's analogy ain't perfect. Yours is worse. If we really wanted to try to make this analogy fit, it might somewhere in between Norsefire's and the following: the Yellow Pages listing a business that sells you catalogs of houses that are empty this weekend.
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Well... what we need.. is a CAR analogy!
Google is like the car that you get in and drive around town in.
While driving, you see a sign on the side of the road-- someone selling hand-made CD's on the side of the road and get some.
Then you see a billboard for a strip-joint, so you pull off the road and help a girl with daddy issues get through college.
Back in your car, you see a sign for some roses and get some for your wife.
So your wife includes Google Auto company in the divorce lawsuit when she discovers li
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If Google and Microsoft were actively publishing information required to pirate music - not just picking up information, but actively publishing it - they would get sued to hard they'd have string coming out of their ass.
Try and get a sense of santiy before drooling out the "OMG they dun it again" nonsense that spews out of the anti-slashdot brigade who hate this website so much they post every five minutes about how shitty it is.
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Maybe it is time to require books to be written in a special ink, requiring special glasses in order to view the books. And when copied, that ink doesn't show up.
Seriously? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Which raises the question: Is a lawsuit against the two biggest companies in technology cheaper than buying some ads?
Probably, but it's also substantially more dangerous.
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Apparently both Blues Destiny Records and Blue Destiny Recordings exist, but not Blue Destiny Records. Anyway, a lawsuit by a small label may be the big four's way of either limiting their risk if they lose or getting around some previous agreement with Google. And by limiting risk I mean avoiding big "Sony, Universal, EMI and Warner sue Google!" headlines when th
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[quote]have appeared when users search Google for the Roy Powers song "Firing Line."[/quote]
Apperently this artist is carried by Blues Destiny Records here [bluesdestinyrecords.com]. TFA would be wrong.
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Aside from the fact that I never heard of them before... $25 per album?! I think we already know why their sales might be down, eh??
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Aside from the fact that I never heard of them before... $25 per album?! I think we already know why their sales might be down, eh??
Curious as to what cost 25 dollars I clicked the grandparent's link to see. The price tag is for their VINYL releases. While 25 dollars seems pricey for a vinyl they put an emphasis on it being 180 grams vinyl. Looking further into this it seems to be some audiophile format that uses a thicker vinyl so the price isn't out of line. Their CDs are 13 bucks, a double album for 25, and a digital download is 10. None of which seems to imply they have a reality distortion field on their prices.
You sir are just who
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An AC says I'm being unfair, but after further review, I disagree:
The price may not be bad for what it is, but vinyl (which appears to be what they're primarily pushing) is still a VERY small market, and alt-blues isn't exactly a mass market genre either. If you sell a fairly-priced yet expensive item, or one that has only limited appeal, its very nature means you will have a limited market, and you cannot fairly blame someone else for your small market. Which is what it appears they're trying to do.
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Good thing (Score:2)
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You never know. Perhaps they are being funded by the very ones they are suing to establish some precedent. For sure it's at the very least the cheapest global advertising you can get even if it never goes to trial or they simply drop it. You pay the couple of hundred dollars or less it costs to file and they get 100's of thousands or more of free publicity.
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I know they probably are sueing in earnest but it seems as though they're trying to take the wind out of record companies sails. (IE you can't sue the ISP for being the medium)
US Jurisdiction (Score:1, Insightful)
"....RapidShare, for its part, is based outside of the US and does not accept DMCA notices."
This is an important concept regarding the internet that most politicians still don't get.
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This is an important concept regarding the internet that most politicians haven't fixed yet.
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Not surprising (Score:1)
> This is an important concept regarding the internet that most politicians still don't get.
It's not clear that "they don't get it". You are assuming that what a politician says is connected with what he wants done or thinks can be done rather than being connected with what he wants others to think about him (so he gets reelected, perhaps via getting more campaign contributions).
Re:US Jurisdiction (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, they DO get it.
Why do you think ACTA is getting pushed?
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Not use AdSense? Why not? AdSense gives you an anonymous, protected way to separate the advertiser from the placement of ads. How many people would willingly call up a porn link site or warez site to advertise there? Right, nobody. AdSense gives the porn linker and warez site an easy way to display ads that the advertiser never knows anything about. And, more importantly, cannot exert any control over specifically what sites their ads appear on. In exchange, they get a cheaper rate and this pretty mu
Google never posted the links in the first place! (Score:1)
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Right, it's a vicarious infringement case. One of the earliest vicarious infringement cases was about a flea market operator who sold space to vendors who sold infringing material; the operator was found liable despite being unaware of the infringement, because he profited from the infringement and had the ability to prevent it (by kicking out the offending vendors).
This case is even weaker, because Google does not have the ability to prevent the infringement, but in general the courts will accept any old
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If someone kills by stabbing them in the head with a knife it's the same charge as if they used a gun, everything else being equal.
Actually, in most of the US, using a firearm in the commission of a violent crime is a slightly different charge set containing an automatic sentence extension, usually of five or ten years. Killing someone by stabbing them in the head with a knife would carry the same charge as caving in the head with a hammer, though.
Re:Google never posted the links in the first plac (Score:5, Insightful)
Bottom line is google harvests, formats and makes available this data, which makes them directly liable.
Wow. You read like an RIAA playbook. Google makes no data available, they just link to it. That's what a search engine does. Google doesn't host any copyrighted music, and I'm sure you know that.
You're making excuses for google.
No more than you or anyone else makes for your ISP, when the media conglomerates try to turn them into a private police organization with enforcement powers. Google may "facilitate" infringement (which is the same weak argument that the RIAA has used over and over) but that doesn't mean that what Google does is or should be automatically actionable. Furthermore, copyright is not just about absolute powers granted to rightsholders (although that is their interpretation of copyright's function in society): it's supposed to be about a balance of rights, with We the People intended to be the ultimate beneficiaries.
... don't publish it in the first place.
... nobody has any right to complain that a major search engine is indexing their works without authorization. So, what you're ultimately saying is that Google should be held responsible for other people publishing information on the Web without the rightsholders permission. Let the copyright holders go after those people, since they are the ones who are illegally distributing copyrighted works. What? There's hundreds of thousands of them and we can't afford to go after them all? Well ... that's just too goddamn bad. These people think they see a cheap way out by suing the search engine (in the same way the MPAA has gone after Torrent indexers.) The difference here is that a. major search engines offer a lot more than just links to copyrighted material and b. tend to have billions of dollars in the bank.
... well, that's not really the case. Smaller music businesses (ones that see modern telecommunications technology as a competitive edge and not a liability) are doing quite well. Even musicians who have bypassed the conventional route to getting their music out have found t
Google and similar organizations offer society tremendous benefits: should those be tossed by the wayside in order to preserve a legal fiction that serves to benefit wealthy corporations that only wish one thing: to become even more wealthy? At our expense? I don't think so. Personally, I think Google and all search engines should be completely immunized from any lawsuits resulting from their Web-crawling and indexing activities. Put it like this: if you don't want something to get noticed by a search engine
Google (and all the other big boys) respect the Robot Exclusion Protocol anyway, so nothing will get indexed directly from your site if you don't wish it to be. That's been the case for a long, long time
The world has moved on: the music business is not what it used to be and in fact will never be the same again. If you're a traditional music publisher, take note: attempting to turn back the clock will only hurt lots of people, and won't save you anyway. You need to accept a few facts, and then replace your upper management with people who can think and operate rationally in a radically changed business environment.
Keep in mind that the bloodsuckers who have run our publishing businesses for the past hundred years or so would cheerfully run Google, Yahoo, Bing, Apple and any other major technology corporation out of business if they could, if they perceive even the slightest threat from said companies. That's because they operate criminal organizations who only see their own needs as being of any concern, who wish to continue exploiting their captive creative minds while simultaneously extracting our wallets.
And before you come back and point out that if the big copyright cartels are allowed suffer from infringement, then the little ones will too
Re:Google never posted the links in the first plac (Score:4, Interesting)
I concur, except I see this as a great way to rid us of this issue. With all the $$ that Google & M$ have, and all the sway they get with their lobbying, it will be interesting to see who wins in this battle. If the record company wins, then the RIAAssholes step in and start fucking shit over. If G & M$ win, then you see more sites linking. Either way we get a clearer definition of what we will be allowed to do.
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This is the defense line of every bittorrent indexing site too, since .torrent files (and more recently magnet links) contain no copyrighted data at all. Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Even Sweden, home of The Pirate Bay, has been hard pressed to change their Copyright Law by adding "making available" to the list of taboos, which they did, thereby o
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This is the defense line of every bittorrent indexing site too, since .torrent files (and more recently magnet links) contain no copyrighted data at all.
The last time I checked google provided a few sentences from the SERP which is content from the linked page. As the content is automatically copyrighted once posted, google is in fact displaying copyrighted material.
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As the content is automatically copyrighted once posted, google is in fact displaying copyrighted material.
Which is not, at least under U.S. law, illegal.
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Still, "making available", even if only indirectly, has been criminalized in most jurisdictions, mostly due to US pressure via the WTO.
Which returns to the point I was trying to make: should the major governments of the world permit the corrupting influence of a few large corporations to limit or destroy one of the major technological advances of our time? I mean, Jesus H. Christ, the content cartels and their front organizations (RIAA, MPAA, CRIA, BREIN, etc.) make an incredible amount of high-decibel public noise about"theft" and "stealing" and "public responsibility", and then turn right around and buy Congressmen and have hideous laws
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Google wrote software that makes posting of information faster and more efficient - doesn't mean new rules of law suddenly apply. If someone kills by stabbing them in the head with a knife it's the same charge as if they used a gun, everything else being equal. Obviously the gun is the more efficient way to get the job done.
I’m desperately searching for some logical sense in that metaphor.
What I’m seeing is that you think Google created a more efficient tool to infringe copyright.
I.e. they built the gun.
CHARGE THE GUN MANUFACTURERS WITH MURDER! YEE-AHHH!
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My analogy provided 2 similar methods to come to the same result: knife vs. gun. The knife represents the slow, non-mechanical way to do something while the gun is the evolved, machine-based method. It has ZERO to do with gun manufactures, and if that insolent position is all you could come up with I truly feel for your cognitive abilities; it had to do with the person wielding the weapon. No, before you get lost, google is not the weapon, they are the person. The w
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The knife represents the slow, non-mechanical way to do something while the gun is the evolved, machine-based method.
Correct. Without the gun, murder would be less efficient. So who made the gun?
My point was that search engines make it easier by using their software, they don't just regurgitate what they find. They provide value-add of some-kind or we wouldn't use them. SEs format, process, ranks and do a host of other things before we get a SERP after a query is submitted. All of that work their software does is surface area for liable.
And by the exact same logic a gunsmith makes it easier to commit homicide by using his product.
You are the one who missed the point entirely.
Blue Destiny's reasoning is unsound (Score:1)
FTA: "The suits insists that Google and Microsoft benefit financially because they generate ad revenue from search results. And both companies have received DMCA takedown notices requesting removal of the links in question."
Google would generate several times the revenue by placing the allegedly illegal download links lower so that one would perform multiple searches rather than finding them with the first click. If there is a financial incentive for Google to manipulate results, it would be to lower the
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Business plan (Score:3, Insightful)
What could go wrong?
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That part of the summary is not false but is very misleading.
While they are based outside of the US, they do respond within 24 hours on the takedown notices I've sent them over the past 2 years. I've provided them all the information asked for and each time the files were removed and checksum of those specific files blacklisted.
More Info: http://www.rapidshare.com/abuse.html [rapidshare.com]
How does the DMCA apply? (Score:2)
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I am reminded of a line from Battlestar Galactica (Score:2)
Patently false. (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
And even that is false! The Google results for “Roy Powers Firing Line” [google.com] are:
Roy Powers Firing Line rapidshare file downloads [rapidog.com] ... [myspace.com] ... [tech-forums.net]
Roy Powers Firing Line megaupload file downloads [megauploadbot.com]
Roy Powers - Firing Line (2009) rapidshare [zona-musical.com]
Roy Powers Music Firing Line Out Now! [roypowersmusic.com]
Roy Powers on MySpace Music - Free Streaming MP3s, Pictures
Blues Destiny Records [bluesdestinyrecords.com]
Google and Microsoft sued for links to filesharing sites
Ronny Sessum Funk'n Blues Man Album Out [ronnysessum.com]
Vans Triple Crown of Surfing [triplecrownofsurfing.com]
None of those URLs point to a RapidShare server!
Even the ones that look like they’d have RapidShare links are merely search engines or forums where the RapidShare links are found.
This is so false that it’s laughable. Also, can anyone say Streisand effect?
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Also, can anyone say Streisand effect?
This might be their ultimate goal. Claim to sue giant companies, wait for tech sites to advertise their obscure company.
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I would certainly hope that nobody would actually buy their music after hearing about this.
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Search shared (Score:3, Informative)
Take a look here, this will land you most albums
http://www.searchshared.com/ [searchshared.com]
and it's using google.
Contact Rapidshare? (Score:2)
But no, rather than have their content removed, they would rather make a huge stink about it to try and get attention and press coverage. As a previous poster pointed out, a nice civil email about the matter could have had this whole thing resolved in a day