Grooveshark Shuts Down 226
An anonymous reader writes: Grooveshark, one of the most popular music streaming websites, has announced that they are shutting down immediately. Several lawsuits from the record companies pushed the company out of business. In a notice posted on the Grooveshark website, its two founders said, "[D]espite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service. That was wrong. We apologize. Without reservation." All of their music has been deleted, and the site itself now belongs to the record companies.
NewYorkCountryLawyer adds that according to the settlement (PDF), Grooveshark must pay $50 million, but no money judgment has been entered against individual defendants.
Now where will I find a shark, that also grooves? (Score:5, Funny)
Best I can do now is a shark that can slow dance. It's just not the same.
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Raveshark?
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Downgraded to GrooveEvilTrout.
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GrooveMutantSeaBass
Best of intentions (Score:4, Insightful)
Despite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
Huh? Surely it can't be best of intentions if you publish music on your service for which you know you don't have proper licenses.
Re:Best of intentions (Score:5, Interesting)
Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
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Re:Best of intentions (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if the site itself belongs to the record companies now, the "apology" might be the record companies speaking for the people who originally ran Grooveshark rather than those people being seriously apologetic for their actions.
Re:Best of intentions (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a local-to-me company and I casually know one of the founders/owners. Since the message isn't "signed" and doesn't have a name attributed I can't say for sure if you are right or wrong... of course, even with his name on the message, it wouldn't be a "for sure" thing...
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Do courts give grovelling apologies enough weight that this 'contrition' is a logical strategy to try to reduce any awards of damages? Are such apologies sometimes added as conditions of a settlement, presumably so that the victor can grind the vanquished further into the dirt? Is there some other advantage to issuing one?
I'm not a lawyer, but as an informed layman I can only point out that in some/many/most cases, juries and not judges determine damage awards. Based on the juries I've served on, I can tell you that a rather large amount of people on a jury don't know anything about technology and thus tend to see this kind of thing in real black and white terms where they overvalue the "damage" that the defendant does. I've never served on a jury where this strategy would have made any difference in the damage awards, but
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I think more important is that they gave up all their own intellectual property to whomever.
My guess is that they were required to do this as part of settlement, and the hope on the other side is that somehow grooveshark users will be swayed to change their behavior based on this statement.
As regards the statement itself, it appears crafted by a gifted communications expert, but the smell of PR/inauthenticity is not completely masked. Or, it was crafted by the groovesharks and encoded with a little Wayne's
The clarification... (Score:2)
Anyone with some legal experience able to clarify this? Given that grooveshark wasn't...exactly...apologetic about their strategy(nor has it changed all that much), my assumption is that the sudden shift to grovelling-apology-mode has much more to do with losing than it does with any change of heart.
I'm pretty sure the apology has a hell of a lot more to do with the transfer of control of the domain name to the record label than it has to do with the actual opinions of Grooveshark, or really, anyone who was employed by them, since whatever statements are up currently are hosted on RIAA owned servers on a RIAA owned domain, and likely dictated to RIAA employed web masters by RIAA marketing executives.
I don't think anyone at Grooveshark would willingly admit legal liability so blatantly, unless they had
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Wait what? (Score:5, Insightful)
We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service.
But you still continued? Good plan there.
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The company was taken over by the music industry, any statements and actions are thus by the record companies who're sending a clear message they don't want a streaming service.
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Maybe they should've claimed they were just tunes-sharing. Like Uber.
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I don't think there's any legal threat anymore....
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It was probably in the terms of the settlement. When they ask for an apology in a settlement, you can't half-ass it or make it a smirking "apology". That doesn't mean they believe it personally.
K Bye. (Score:2)
[D]espite best of intentions, we made very serious mistakes. We failed to secure licenses from rights holders for the vast amount of music on the service
How is it that if I shared that many songs with that many people without authorization I'd be fined literally trillions of dollars, but they get to walk away like this? Very odd.
Re:K Bye. (Score:5, Informative)
Who said they are getting to walk away with just an apology? Their statement includes:
Note the "as part of a settlement agreement ..." part - which indicates that shutting down operations isn't the end of it for them.
Re:K Bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
if the music companies were smart, they'd continue to operate the site
"we shut down the pirates! that will end this threat once and for all!"
(two weeks later, 20 more sites)
it should have been:
"this is a popular site. now that we own it we will modify it slightly so that we derive some revenue from it while not pissing off the listeners, thus gracefully transitioning to a new distribution model that listeners desire"
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I agree that the more intelligent thing would have been for the site branding to be used for legitimate service rather than trying to shame the users while pointing out other services and hoping for the best.
However, the likelihood that they could have modified it 'slightly' while 'not pissing off the listeners' is pretty slim. The music selection would have had to be torched and started over from scratch (too many content owners without an agreement between them) and something would have had to give to ac
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true
i still feel there is a more nuanced solution to these situations where more benefit is derived
just turning the power switch off seems like a waste of value, however damaged
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They don't want to operate Grooveshark. They just want to make sure that no service operates where they don't get paid. They're being paid by Spotify and the other services. It's Spotify and their ilk's problem to operate a streaming service. The *industry* doesn't care, since a lack of streaming just means they can go back to making sales on CDs.
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that will never happen again. customers will share files online
but in your sentence is exactly the stupidity that shows why the music industry is dying. for not embracing the technology where their customers are
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I suspect that the situation is more complicated than that. Multiple recording labels, multiple interests. All the licensing of the music would revert to square one, with all the current copies having to be disposed of.
The world of intellectual property is too complicated for this sort of thing to be easy, sadly. I also never used Grooveshark. I'm still mostly a broadcast radio kind of person when it comes to music.
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Can't really do that or they legitimize this model and Spotify and all the rest start jumping on the bandwagon and the publishers start losing their juicy cuts of those services.
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Note the "as part of a settlement agreement ..." part - which indicates that shutting down operations isn't the end of it for them.
It might not be all of it, but I'm pretty sure it's the end of it. Nobody settles half a case, particularly not when you bend over like this. The only reason Grooveshark would agree is if they got an exit opportunity where they could fold their hand and walk away from it, presumably because the other side's lawyers found there was nothing more to be gained from the company and piercing the corporate veil or pursuing criminal convictions wasn't possible or not worth it.
Corporations are people too (Score:5, Insightful)
Except without all that silly permanence when things go wrong.
As long as the founders played the corporation game right, they have no personal liability at stake. A corporation is just like a person, except that when a corporation violates a law which would burden it for life, or financially destroy it, it magically disintegrates leaving the real people who ran it into the ground clean and unencumbered by their wrongdoing.
There are good reasons for the existence of corporations; this isn't one of them.
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That's the most common outcome, but it doesn't always work that way. It is possible for the court to hold the corporate officers or investors personally liable. It's called piercing the corporate veil. Doesn't happen too frequently, but it happened to Limewire (http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2010/05/limewire_smacke.htm), who played in the same space, just a few years ago.
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It is tragic in a manner of speaking, when you see the death of an idea that the company wanted to bring to the table. If Grooveshark would have succeeded, it would have been... interesting. It was never going to happen, it was just too explicitly illegal, but they held out awhile.
It is also tragic in that real people lose their jobs, possibly suddenly.
Corporations aren't just CEOs and shareholders. I can feel bad for one going under, even if I don't necessarily consider them to be people. Corporations
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Because you aren't a incorporated company. Individuals in management might get to walk away, but the company and all it's assets (if any) doesn't.
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Re:K Bye. (Score:5, Insightful)
They didn't quite get to 'just walk away'. They were given a choice, an impossibly high fine to pay or hand over all their patents, copyrights, infrastructure, software, basically everything while very publicly scraping the ground about how wrong what they did was.
Essentially, they had something of value that was interesting to the plaintiffs that was bigger than their realistic chances at getting actual money out of them.
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You can get at the owners in certain circumstances, and it is likely that rolling over at settlement probably was the line where further fighting would have started exposing the owners to actual liability either from the fines or investor lawsuits and such.
Too good to be true. (Score:2)
Grooveshark let users to listen to the music the users payed for.
When you pay for music, you neither own the music, the media, the files or even the right to listen to it where you want.
You should have known it was too good to be true.
FTFY (Score:2, Informative)
Grooveshark let users to listen to the music the users payed for and all music ever uploaded to Grooveshark even if they didn't pay for that music.
There. FTFY.
If you didn't sing it... (Score:2)
If you neither sung it yourself, nor obtained the singer's permission, you have no right to play it. Seems like a perfectly self-evident rule to me.
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Anymore isn't it if you didn't compose the music, write the lyrics, and then perform both, all while using a series of words, notes, and/or chords that have not been organized in a similar fashion, either as an entirely or as smaller subsets, then you have no right to think about it in a public space.
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Whatever you do, don't tell someone to shut up, you will get sued for that. [cnn.com]
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I said nothing about listening. I wrote only about playing.
If the 10 Commandments were the sort of "living and breathing document", that certain people claim the US Constitution to be, the "Thou shalt not play records without recorder's permissions" would've been in it by now.
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Due to abusive legislation, that has been stolen from us. Your great grand-children will be dead before the song you heard on the Top-40 station this morning is in public domain. Even Elon Musk's batteries will be out of patent protect
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thank you, well said
Records companies... (Score:2)
Virtual DJ / DJs often use GrooveShark (Score:2)
As an occasional substitute DJ, this will impact me. I use Virtual DJ software package; it uses GrooveShark as a primary music service. (It also scours the web with their own service that isn't as good.)
(Without reading all of it...) It looks like the judgment cites digital distribution, which is generally covered by SoundExchange. SoundExchange generally covers the type of license (statutory) that covers the media or streaming rights. Whereas the performance rights (BMI, ASCAP) cover the performance ri
They could off just asked me if it was legal (Score:2, Interesting)
...because I spent 1.5 years of my life @ MP3.com running reports and collecting data as discovery for the lawsuits of record companies, publishers, individual artists, and whomever owned any percentage of any playback rights in any country (and yes this means people who owned less that 1% of a song's rights in Turkmenistan).
Hoping they return... (Score:3)
I'd love if they could start a new company that pays royalties, Spotify-style, where it can, yet allows users to share rare or otherwise unavailable content as well. Because of the mess of regional rights ownership there will probably never a fully legal way to enjoy all music worldwide, so a gray market will always be necessary to fill the gaps.
In the meantime, I'll sing a song [youtube.com] for them.
(...and good luck downloading that legally, US slashdotters)
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It does not appear to be available from Google Play. However, in the US, it is perfectly legal to grab the Youtube video, so there is that.
no wonder they got shutdown (Score:3)
they forgot the lasers
Figures (Score:2)
A streaming service that offers more than the usual EU/US crap had to end sooner or later. This seemed to be pretty much the only service in the western world with a decent enough selection of Japanese and Korean music.
The labels own it now so...? (Score:2)
So now that the labels own the website, what will they do with it?!
They have a crappy reputation for shutting down sites which actually function pretty well in terms of giving consumers what they actually want, and then never reviving them again.
Wouldn't it make sense for the labels to operate these things? Why don't they? It's been over 15 years now.
ad
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You seem to be under the mistaken impression that fairness and justice has something to do with this.
It doesn't.
It is about the simple exercise of power.
The record companies *can* take everything... so they *do* take everything, right or wrong.
The alternative would've been that Grooveshark fights a losing battle in court for years or a decade, only to lose everything in the end anyway.
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Because the copyright infringement fees* they would have been subjected to would have likely bankrupted them and those patents, software, etc would need to be sold off anyway. So the settlement was likely "give us all your stuff and we won't seek further fines that might wind up bankrupting you, personally, for life."
* You can agree or disagree with copyright laws/fee structures (and I often do), but you don't get to violate copyright, get caught, say "Oops, silly me, I'll go legit now", and get off scot-f
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This keeps them from closing the doors on Grooveshark, and then immediately starting some new service, say GrooveBarracuda (or selling their software, patents and IP to some other enterprise looking to do the same thing).
Since the record companies now own their IP, anybody who tries to resurrect Grooveshark using the old software would also face charges of patent infringement, trademark infringement, etc (unless they build everything from scratch, which would be a much larger investment).
For the record c
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Those are corporation assets and are being taken in lieu of a punitive fine. If they didn't turn them over then the corporation would have been fined, gone into bankruptcy, and those assets would have been sold off to pay the debt by the bankruptcy trustee anyway.
It's not clear why they wouldn't have just gone bankrupt, but there's probably terms in there that would be better than they would get if they had gone down kicking and screaming. Well, more kicking and screaming than they did before the case wen
Re:Try again... 4? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people think all this music is Free?
Sure, musicians are being screwed over by the labels and publishers, but that's not a reason to outright steal it and deny the musicians the meager cash they are getting paid.
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Welcome to the Entitlement Generation.
Population - just about everyone.
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If you pay 1/100th or 1/200th the full retail price of a toothbrush, expect to pay every time you use it. That's what's happening with streaming music. Listeners are paying a tiny fraction of the 99 cent song to listen to it once.
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You fundamentally fail to understand intellectually property rights
i do understand intellectual property rights, that's how i know intellectual property is fundamentally wrong.
you, however, seem to fail to understand how the media industry works.
Re:Try again... 4? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do people think all this music is Free?
Might I remind you that our app stores are slam full of Free apps, which is the price that the users today demanded.
You know, apps like Pandora...that users can download and install without charge and listen to thousands of hours of music.
I'd say it's pretty fucking obvious why users think music is free. The industry is presenting it that way.
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Pandora makes it pretty clear that music at least costs attention. It has a *lot* of ads, both audio and on the screen. They tell you that you can make the ads go away, for a price.
People still don't quite connect that attention is being used as money, and they do still think of things as "free" even when they're paying in attention. But of all the ad-supported mechanisms I've seen, Pandora most specifically seems to make clear that you're paying one way or another.
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Why do people think all this music is Free?
Sure, musicians are being screwed over by the labels and publishers, but that's not a reason to outright steal it and deny the musicians the meager cash they are getting paid.
Yes, but I refuse to support these some companies who keep lobbying to extend the copyright law, and do over devious actions in the name of profit for themselves, not for the artists.
Re:Try again... 4? (Score:5, Informative)
Stealing is the taking of property with the intention of depriving the owner of the use of said property.
Copying a piece of music is not stealing because it does not suddenly disappear from the hard drive of the musician or render the musician unable to perform it.
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Thanks! Now can you define "colloquial" for us all too?
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The definition of stealing does not require tangible property, it just involves depriving the owner of that property.
If you take a trade secret from someone and share it with the world, you have stolen the trade secret, because, while the owner might still have the information, they have been deprived of a secret that was not yours to share. Plagiarism too is a form of stealing, for you are depriving the author of a work from their name rights. (And yes, while not honored in the U.S. outside the bounds of
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Copying a piece of music is not stealing because it does not suddenly disappear from the hard drive of the musician or render the musician unable to perform it.
It is not stealing. You are absolutely right. It is copyright infringement. Punishable with fines up to $150,000 per work (unless the copyright holder can prove that the actual damage is higher).
Re:Try again... 4? (Score:4, Informative)
And also, as is commonly stated here, just because I'm willing to download an album for free does not mean I would have bought it for ten dollars had the free download not been available. If anything, my downloading the free album exposes me to an artist that I otherwise would not have been as familiar with and make me far more likely to attend their shows, where they can charge me anywhere from 10-200 dollars at the door.
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So I expect you are against patents too. So if you invest 5 years and 5 million dollars into designing a product that no one else has and everyone needs, you're cool with someone stealing your design and selling it for lower costs?
Re:Try again... 4? (Score:4, Insightful)
The patent system is actually there to let other people copy your design, but adds a grace period where you can be paid back for your effort in working on an idea, usually through making sure you are first to implement that idea. It is merely supposed to be a provision to encourage you to share an idea which you might otherwise hide while you sought to benefit from it. It is not supposed to "protect" your "property".
It is quite possible for a company to preserve its trade secrets without a patent. Patents are primarily supposed to help the People, not the "owners". The patent period is a bribe so that the information is more effectively spread and not hidden.
If a patent is turned from a vehicle which is supposed to encourage the spread of ideas into simply a government sponsored industry, which counter intuitively tries to make it harder to spread ideas, it goes against the original reason for patents.
Copyright has a similar premise, and is going the same way. Mickey Mouse or a Metallica album is supposed to be protected only long enough to make it worthwhile for the artist to profit from its creation. That isn't supposed to be a guarantee that they get to drive a Bentley at the end of it or that you'll be able to have an industry based on the limitation of ideas.
What is actually happening is that the copyright and patents are being used to make it worthwhile not for the artist to make their music or the inventor to profit from their invention, it's being used to make it possible for publishing companies and patent-holding organizations to profit from the works of those artists. That's why copyrights are getting extended all the time.
Ease in which music or ideas can be copied should be a hint that these are not a solid basis for an industry. And the extremes to which these industries go to in order to halt the natural spread of performances and ideas only proves that point.
As someone who works in software, I think we have actually solved this issue very simply. Open source software makes money and provides a living to people who work with it every day. The ease in which that software can be copied has only made it more popular and the people who have created it even more in demand.
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In which case they don't file patents. If trade secret is incapable of protecting the IP (by threats such as reverse engineering), they file patents. It's common sense, since trade secrets can last almost infinite years.
Not true. Patent are an exchange of resources -- a deal/trade. The patent holder can make a ton of money off his novel invention (because of
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Of course, I am speaking of the reason for patents to be authorized, at least under the US Constitution, not the actual functioning of patents, which definitely has a debatable effect on the ability of an inventor to profit reasonably from their invention.
Personally, I'd be fine with them doing away patents at this point. A scenario that punishes an implementer to the benefit of someone who buys a regulatory fiction like a patent, is counter productive.
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It was his decision to record music and sell it to the public.
Fixed.
If you enjoyed his work, he happens to have a sale going on...$10 for the album and you can enjoy it anytime you want. You can put it on your computer, ipod, cell phone and enjoy it anywhere.
But if you just download it and do the same, then you are taking money out of his pocket just the same as if you lifted a bag of chips from 7-11.
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Why do people think all this music is Free?
Sure, musicians are being screwed over by the labels and publishers, but that's not a reason to outright steal it and deny the musicians the meager cash they are getting paid.
In the past, free (stolen) music was not common - relatively speaking - because the means of distribution were limited. The average consumer of music understood that the form factor - record, 8 track, tape, CD - required they buy it once. This set the bar for musicians (though let's be honest, record companies always made the lion share of the profit) to expect they could sell their music at a certain price.
Fast forward to our hyper-connected world, delivery seems effortless, or at least bundled with the mo
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I'm guessing you have never heard of mix tapes or mix cds? I imagine it even happened in the 8 track era as well, but I don't have experience back that far.
In the middle ages, it was common for music to be shared for free, what suddenly changed to make it so expensive? It has only gotten easier to reproduce music.
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Most people did not record on 8-track, but cassette and 8-track were largely coincident formats, kind of like betamax and vhs. 8-track offered playback convenience and maybe a little quality bump in the beginning, cassette offered size convenience (until we got auto-reverse).
True audiophiles back in the day would record to reel-to-reel.
To return to the thread, pirated music goes back a long, long way. It was just sheet music before performance recordings. And before that, bards copied each others' songs. An
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It goes back even farther than the 8-track era... I still have a *huge* collection of my father's mid-to-late 1960's equivalent of mix-tapes and concert bootlegs... on reel-to-reel.
But, yes, there were kids dragging portable reel-to-reel recorders out to concerts back when the Beatles were still a fairly new thing, and they were certainly running a wire from their friends' record players to the line-in/mic jack on the aforementioned player/recorders (and more than a few who rigged a few similar setups off t
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I'm guessing you have never heard of mix tapes or mix cds? I imagine it even happened in the 8 track era as well, but I don't have experience back that far.
In the middle ages, it was common for music to be shared for free, what suddenly changed to make it so expensive? It has only gotten easier to reproduce music.
As I said, people tended to buy music once. Yes, there was pirating in the form of mix tapes, but I'm fairly certain it was not even a drop in the bucket of online piracy (to use the parlance of our time).
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online piracy
Or maybe I should say, digital piracy.
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To be fair, radio is/was was as 'free' as Google is today.
The radio's 'product for sale' isn't the music, but the ears of its listeners sold in a 15/30/60 second time-slice to advertisers.
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Maybe RADIO had something to do with it......You know getting free music for almost a CENTURY...
Radio isn't "free." The radio stations had to pay the record labels, songwriters and artists for the music they played. In turn, they charged businesses money for - horrors - "unskippable" ads that you had to listen to. Or in the case of public radio stations, asking you for money directly to keep them on the air.
There is no free lunch.
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You know getting free but old, overplayed music for almost a CENTURY...
FTFY! Radio plays the same, banal top 100 music over and over. These songs have been played so many times on radio, nobody enjoys them anymore. If radio started to play all the good music, nobody would buy records, they would just listen to the radio.
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Lets be clear, when you say music do you mean some nerd hitting running some scripts in some synthesizer program, because that definitely has value.
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Think about it. You may love the open source movement, but how would you like it if you wrote software at your day job for a salary...and then one day the government said "Hey, we decided that all software is free now. So you can't charge for it, even if you worked hard to make it and invested tons of money in the software-making process."
That's a nonsense argument. Absent monopoly grants, software goes to the person who paid for it, and they have the choice of whether to release it or not.
It's when it's r
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If you wrote some software and sold it to someone for $1000, you are cool with them making copies and giving it away?
After all, you still have your copy and the original buyer still has theirs. So it's not stealing, right?
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If you wrote some software and sold it to someone for $1000, you are cool with them making copies and giving it away?
If it took him less than 20 hours, he's making over $104,000 / year writing software, so he's probably OK with it.
The entire GNU philosophy / GNU Manifesto is based on the idea that software writers are craftsmen engaged in making works for hire. It's no different than making furniture.
I personally don't agree with that economic model, but I'm pretty sure by his statements that he's OK with it.
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This sounds absurd, but that's my point. You can't FORCE music to be free.
I don't understand. You don't force soundwaves to be free. They are free by default. Similarly, bits and bites are free by default. There is nothing absurd about it - proprietary software and singers are in the same boat.
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"Can you"? Could you clarify? Do you mean legally under copyright law?
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Let me put it this way... there's plenty of free sand on the beaches. Can someone offer me a free CPU, since it is mainly made of sand (and should therefore be free according to your logic)?
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Are you the same guy? Anyway... there is inherent value added when you manufacture something from raw materials. The raw materials themselves are also on someone's property. Sand is not "free" and neither are microchips.
On the other hand, if someone is whistling a song and the song winds its way into your head and you start to whistle the same song, you have not stolen anything, there is no moral hazard, and copying the song was completely free.
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There's a whole list in Bite magazine :)
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And as someone who has produced both software and music, I agree 100% with the parent on this. And I'm not posting AC :)
I get paid for what I produce, not for what other people experience/consume. This is the case for most developers of intellectual property. It's the next level up: the lawyers/distributors/vendors that require payment for distribution of intellectual property. A lot of their work would vanish if Congress made such a move, because their jobs are artificially created.
Anyone who actually p
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copyright
käprt/
noun
noun: copyright; plural noun: copyrights
1. the exclusive legal right, given to an originator or an assignee to print, publish, perform, film, or record literary, artistic, or musical material, and to authorize others to do the same.
adjective
adjective: copyright
1. protected by copyright.
"permission to reproduce photographs and other copyright material"
Sure...just because you write a tune doesn't mea
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I don't buy new music or go to concerts
Lots of people don't buy new music, and it's not because they're boycotting an "evil industry", it's because all the new music sucks.
I don't go to movies or subscribe to cable
"Cord cutting" is skyrocketing, and again it's not because people are intentionally boycotting, it's because cable TV is just commercial-packed bullshit programming like Honey Boo Boo and people have lost interest, as they would rather spend their free time doing or seeing things on the internet.
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yet another victim of the cloud. tragic.