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I was one of the original engineers on MP3.com. Shortly after our music locker service debuted, we got sued by all the major labels. I spent 4 months writing
by agrippanux 9y ago
I was one of the original engineers on MP3.com.
Shortly after our music locker service debuted, we got sued by all the major labels. I spent 4 months writing tools to pull all the discovery data for their lawsuits.
When it was apparent our court case was going south, the major music publishers sued us as well (lead by Harry Fox Agency). I spent another 4 months pulling discovery data for those lawsuits.
When those court cases trended badly for us, we got sued by every 2 bit operation that owned a partial percentage of the country-based rights to a song (ie, one company may of owned 4% the rights of a song in the United States and 10% in Mexico and 9.3% in Ireland, with another company owning 1.3%, 40%, .5% respectively). I spent another 4 months pulling discovery data for those lawsuits.
Finally, after we where acquired by Vivendi Universal and they took on our liabilities, I spent almost a year writing tools for them to pay these partial percentages. Have you ever had to split 1 cent via check between 3 parties? It's not fun.
Moral of this boring story is Spotify better win this fast and clean or they are in a world of pain; I can never get those 2 years of my life back.
- spike021 9y agoIf you don't mind me asking, is there any particular reason you didn't just leave? I'd imagine this fits the kind of situation where you aren't obligated to stay.
- amigoingtodie 9y agoI am guessing stock options/vesting. I believe Alanis took mp3.com stock as payment. That was a different time. The Beam-it software was pretty cool.
- ssharp 9y agoIt was a different time, but probably not that different figuratively. Things like Shatner taking Priceline stock to be their spokesperson played into the dot-com mania narrative of the time, but now that's seen as a shrewd business move. 50 Cent had a $60-100 million exit with Vitamin Water and Lebron had a $30 million exit with Beats.
- sirmarksalot 9y agoDepending on the timeline, this may have overlapped with the dot-com crash, in which case a programmer would be happy to have any job they could get.
- ryanisnan 9y ago$
- chriszelazo 9y agoDefinitely al about the money
- TeMPOraL 9y agoYes. That's literally the reason most of us deal with bullshit at our dayjobs every day.
- spike021 9y agoHow does that work if the company was being sued? Do they have some kind of reserve to pay current employees with?
- kickopotomus 9y agoBeing tied up in a lawsuit does not grind a company to a halt. Most of the Fortune 500 is probably getting sued right now for some reason or another. Also, when a company loses a lawsuit, the court doesn’t automatically debit the damages from the company. Winning a case and collecting damages are 2 very different things.
- spike021 9y agoThanks for the explanation, wasn't sure how that kind of thing works.
- _eht 9y agoOh, hey man!
- dang 9y agoPlease don't do this here.
- xab9 9y agoThe billion dollar question. Why didn't you leave. Couple of weeks ago been talking to a coworker and said him that _sometimes_ people end up in uncomfortable situations. Family, children, debt, divorce, medical, elderly parents and so on - he said, that's not possible, because people _should_ plan their lives.
- Terr_ 9y agoAh, the Just World Hypothesis. "Something bad happens, you must've screwed up somehow. Just look at me, I'm doing fine and I instinctively know that random good-luck had nothing to do with it."
- ZeroGravitas 9y agoYou forgot the most important psychological part "... and if that wasn't true, then life would be terrifying". People believe in the witchdoctor's raindance because the alternative is to believe your entire life is at the mercy of the random chance of weather and could be destroyed at any moment. Which is true, but hard to deal with mentally.
- RobertoG 9y agoI think that effect it's called by psychologists "fundamental attribution error". It has been studied for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
- Sinergy2 9y agoIt's called the Just World Hypothesis and has indeed been studied for decades. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis
- Terr_ 9y agoThey are certainly related, but not quite the same. JWT is based on whether positive or negative outcomes were "deserved" and the extent to which randomness exists. In contrast, FAE touches on what you believe motivated an individual to act, and whether it was innate or circumstantial.
- gus_massa 9y agoDid he get paid for his work during these two years? It doesn't look like a funny work [1] but it brings home the bacon. [1] Perhaps the first wave is interesting, but the third or fourth time is probably a little repetitive.
- spuz 9y agoWhat does "pulling discovery data" mean? Why did MP3.com get sued?
- adventist 9y agoI take it that "discovery" is the process of communicating with the people who are suing providing the raw data and facts as to their basis for suing. This could be a giant spreadsheet of the songs that were sold and what was paid on it.
- davis 9y agoIn a legal case, discovery means evidence/data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law) This person was probably writing scripts/tools to grab data from email servers, databases, code, etc.
- rhizome 9y agoIn this context I imagine it's primarily the collection and collation of play logs.
- bogomipz 9y ago>"we got sued by every 2 bit operation that owned a partial percentage of the country-based rights to a song" Were these these each each country's performing rights societies then? I am confused on why these are partial percentages. I would have though that they would be 100% owned in each country. Does the performing right society divide up 1 pie amongst all its affiliates in each of the countries. Do you have any idea what the final amount Vivendi paid out to straighten everything out? I am guessing they had good idea of that before the acquisition, so I am guessing it was still a good investment for them.
- nemothekid 9y agoI worked on a similar system for various music rights holders. It could be a record label, recording studio or even a song writer that holds a partial percentage of the proceeds from a composition, performance, or recording, and the actual percentage owned could vary by country. So in Norway, Sony, Mom&Pop Music and your uncle Joe could hold various rights on a song, and in Sweden hold entirely different rights. Based on various revshares, contracts and agreements the amount paid out to each entity could vary as well - in my case sometimes they even varied on the platform it was played on, who played the song, etc. It's very complicated and there are a ton of edge cases. These edge cases is where a lot of the partial percentages and confusing ownerships come from. And it doesn't help that there's a lot of music out there for which the metadata is really bad. The majors have complicated systems to figure this out (not sophisticated-complicated, more like 1-million lines of business logic complicated), mainly because they have to.
- buster 9y agoBut i think that's what the collecting societies of each country are for. Not every artist/composer is a member of one though, so that's probably where those come from. What can happen is, that a rights holders music is played in another country so that this countries collecting society has to transfer the money to the respective collecting society in his country. The collecting society then splits up the money for that song among all rights holders (labels, composers, songwriters, etc.). That's where small percentages and sub-cent calculations come from. At least that's how it works in germany. The GEMA (german collecting society for composers and such) collects money for songs being played in germany. The rights holder may not be a member of the GEMA and as such the money will be transfered to the collecting society of the member. At least that's my understanding. See https://www.gema.de/en/musikurheber/become-a-member/information-on-membership/ https://www.gema.de/en/musikurheber/become-a-member/informat... for distribution on authors/composers/publishers.
- iaw 9y agoI've done two reconciliations in my career, each lasting a month. Never again.
- jrochkind1 9y ago> When it was apparent our court case was going south, the major music publishers sued us as well (lead by Harry Fox Agency). From the OP: > Wixen also alleged that Spotify outsourced its work to a third party, licensing and royalty services provider the Harry Fox Agency, which was “ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses”. If there's any justice, if they lose at all in court Spotify will be suing Harry Fox for damages too.
- rhizome 9y agoWixen also alleged that Spotify outsourced its work to a third party, licensing and royalty services provider the Harry Fox Agency, which was “ill-equipped to obtain all the necessary mechanical licenses” Not to mention that SoundExchange makes zero effort to track down rightsholders, seemingly because they get to keep any left over royalties they collect, and IIRC these extra royalties may also be partially distributed to top artists regardless of whoever a particular leftover royalty dollar should be allocated.
- visarga 9y agoI was very sad the day MP3.com closed. I loved the music there, and it was in an age before YT. Was the catalog deleted or did it survive?