9 ms·

Be careful what you put in an email

139 points by kunle 15y ago

nohat 15y ago
That seems almost intentionally damning. Why would he put that in writing? This is disappointing because I really like grooveshark's service.
- a3camero 15y ago
  Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in discovery!
  - refurb 15y ago
    That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words.
    - adgar 15y ago
      What context do you think might explain this away, given the content?
      - ChrisLTD 15y ago
        What if, right before he wrote that, he said "here's me pretending to be the evil guy the music execs think I am." :-)
  - adgar 15y ago
    That's because people don't usually go out of their way to produce damning evidence. Damning evidence is an accident, that's why you don't find much of it, even among "tens of thousands of documents." Which is why careful scrutiny of discovery documents is important in any legal case.
drivingmenuts 15y ago
Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least not cause them in the first place). This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition.
maeon3 15y ago
Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were accidentally deleted.
huckfinnaafb 15y ago
Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair deception?
- nathanb 15y ago
  The second paragraph, if I'm reading it correctly, details how they don't report streaming data to the labels until they have enough data to guarantee that they can charge labels more than the cost of streaming the songs. I imagine the labels don't particularly care for this behavior, and history (specifically Grooveshark's history) seems to have borne this out.
  - tantalor 15y ago
    > they don't report streaming data What do you mean? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics.
    - dangrossman 15y ago
      > Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics. There is no contract. Users upload the music the service is streaming to everyone. Most of that music is copyrighted and the company has no license (or any other contract) allowing them to stream it. They expected to eventually be sued by one or more labels for doing this. They also expected to have enough data by then to use it to negotiate a contract where they actually make money while legally licensing the music.
      - tantalor 15y ago
        > the company has no license Did I miss this part? Source, please.
        dangrossman 15y ago
nathanb 15y ago
I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case, sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some law (patents and copyrights are a minefield). I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but less often than you might think.
- aidenn0 15y ago
  Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you.
  - dctoedt 15y ago
    > If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. Unfortunately, the flip side might be as bad or worse: If you deleted emails or other potentially-relevant documents at a time when a lawsuit was reasonably foreseeable, then you could be hit with an adverse inference [1]. That is, the judge might conclusively presume (or instruct the jury to conclusively presume) that the missing emails or documents must have been really bad, otherwise you wouldn't have destroyed them. And if government authorities were involved, then you could be indicted on criminal charges of obstruction of justice. (That ultimately destroyed accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP [2].) That's why opposing counsel can get downright orgasmic when their adversary has deleted emails or destroyed documents, and when this can be "spun" as having been motivated by a desire to conceal harmful evidence. I used to think it made sense to adopt, and then follow, a comprehensive "document retention" [sic] policy, where documents are reviewed every X months for possible destruction. In the real world, though, people get busy, and they don't take the time to do periodic document reviews. Then, suddenly, a lawsuit is imminent, and people realize they still have all these documents that should have been routinely destroyed but never were. So they try to play catch-up with a shredding party. The belatedly-destroyed documents might be utterly harmless, but that might not matter. (A belated shredding party is what got Arthur Andersen indicted.) RULES OF THUMB: If your organization doesn't already have a document-retention policy, here are two serviceable rules of thumb that might help (YMMV, I'm not your lawyer, etc.): A) Keep emails and other documents for as long as you think you'll have a business need for them -- and keep in mind that sometimes the law mandates specific retention periods for certain categories of document; B) If there's a non-trivial possibility of a lawsuit that would be even remotely related to the subject matter of the emails or other documents, then don't destroy them without first checking with your lawyer. As the saying goes, sometimes the cover-up --- whether real, or simply the product of opposing counsel's "spin" --- is worse than the crime. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen
tompagenet2 15y ago
Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width. Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird
- sp332 15y ago
  I think the hinting on this font is broken in Chrome for some reason.
- benhoyt 15y ago
  Yeah, those are terrible letter shapes. It happens in IE8 on Windows XP for me too.
DevX101 15y ago
How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails?
- jamesaguilar 15y ago
  Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit, per standard practice.
goodspeller 15y ago
what a disgrase! can't even spell "quiet"!
shill 15y ago
The 'e' in email is short for 'evidence'. Little known fact.
DrJokepu 15y ago
This wasn't really a secret, many people in the phonographic industry (including some at the record labels themselves) knew or suspected for quite a while that Grooveshark's business plan was something like this.
code_duck 15y ago
This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails. They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy' ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing, from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to shake up that industry.
- paulhauggis 15y ago
  "Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts." VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN?
  - psychotik 15y ago
    The artist-label relationship is similar to entrepreneur-VC relationship in more than just this one regard. Angels/incubators are like indie labels, and the relationship there is slightly less skewed, but most parallels still exist.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride? So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo. So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.
__abc 15y ago
Beware what you put in any medium that can be retransmitted without your permissions :)
feralchimp 15y ago
"Rude reminder that one needs to be very careful when sending emails"...when one is a shady-ass character up to some shady-ass shit. This is less of a business plan than it is a hedge fund betting on one side of a race condition. The bet is that user growth will outpace successful litigation against the investment. It would be less ethically problematic if they were doing the piracy themselves instead of croudsourcing it.
billpatrianakos 15y ago
What a dumb move. I'm really interested to know who the recipient was. This isn't about watching what you write more so than just being judicious about what information you choose to share and with whom you share it. That segment of email made the email's author sound condescending and made the business itself look shady. I personally don't see any problem with that business model at all but there will be people who read it in a condescending tone. One last thing, the spelling. How in the world does anyone who wants to be taken seriously get away with that sort of spelling? Especially if you're running a business. Slang and shorthand are for teenage texts, not emails from high level execs. I'm a high level executive myself. I'm the CEO/Founder/President of my $20k/yr business that has its office based in my living room and even I wouldn't let that happen in an email from me or anyone representing the work I do. The way you speak and write reflects on you in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a hillbilly.
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  I'm usually one to wince upon these mistakes, but for all I know a Nobel Prize winner could be a hillbilly. Some people like to use their time to get things done instead of worrying about grammar. It takes some time to accept that.
- darklajid 15y ago
  Spelling: I for one couldn't parse it. I stumbled a handful of times and just stopped reading, looked at the comments here instead. Looked like a kid texting to me.
  - billpatrianakos 15y ago
    Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point. I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
> Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can. Clearly the lesson here is that you need to spellcheck carefully before sending out your emails.

139 points by kunle 15y ago

nohat 15y ago

That seems almost intentionally damning. Why would he put that in writing? This is disappointing because I really like grooveshark's service.

a3camero 15y ago
Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in discovery!
- refurb 15y ago
  That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words.
  - adgar 15y ago
    What context do you think might explain this away, given the content?
    - ChrisLTD 15y ago
      What if, right before he wrote that, he said "here's me pretending to be the evil guy the music execs think I am." :-)
- adgar 15y ago
  That's because people don't usually go out of their way to produce damning evidence. Damning evidence is an accident, that's why you don't find much of it, even among "tens of thousands of documents." Which is why careful scrutiny of discovery documents is important in any legal case.

drivingmenuts 15y ago

Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least not cause them in the first place). This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition.

maeon3 15y ago

Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were accidentally deleted.

huckfinnaafb 15y ago

Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair deception?

nathanb 15y ago
The second paragraph, if I'm reading it correctly, details how they don't report streaming data to the labels until they have enough data to guarantee that they can charge labels more than the cost of streaming the songs. I imagine the labels don't particularly care for this behavior, and history (specifically Grooveshark's history) seems to have borne this out.
- tantalor 15y ago
  > they don't report streaming data What do you mean? How did you arrive at this conclusion? Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics.
  - dangrossman 15y ago
    > Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics. There is no contract. Users upload the music the service is streaming to everyone. Most of that music is copyrighted and the company has no license (or any other contract) allowing them to stream it. They expected to eventually be sued by one or more labels for doing this. They also expected to have enough data by then to use it to negotiate a contract where they actually make money while legally licensing the music.
    - tantalor 15y ago
      > the company has no license Did I miss this part? Source, please.
      - dangrossman 15y ago

nathanb 15y ago

I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case, sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some law (patents and copyrights are a minefield). I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but less often than you might think.

aidenn0 15y ago
Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you.
- dctoedt 15y ago
  > If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. Unfortunately, the flip side might be as bad or worse: If you deleted emails or other potentially-relevant documents at a time when a lawsuit was reasonably foreseeable, then you could be hit with an adverse inference [1]. That is, the judge might conclusively presume (or instruct the jury to conclusively presume) that the missing emails or documents must have been really bad, otherwise you wouldn't have destroyed them. And if government authorities were involved, then you could be indicted on criminal charges of obstruction of justice. (That ultimately destroyed accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP [2].) That's why opposing counsel can get downright orgasmic when their adversary has deleted emails or destroyed documents, and when this can be "spun" as having been motivated by a desire to conceal harmful evidence. I used to think it made sense to adopt, and then follow, a comprehensive "document retention" [sic] policy, where documents are reviewed every X months for possible destruction. In the real world, though, people get busy, and they don't take the time to do periodic document reviews. Then, suddenly, a lawsuit is imminent, and people realize they still have all these documents that should have been routinely destroyed but never were. So they try to play catch-up with a shredding party. The belatedly-destroyed documents might be utterly harmless, but that might not matter. (A belated shredding party is what got Arthur Andersen indicted.) RULES OF THUMB: If your organization doesn't already have a document-retention policy, here are two serviceable rules of thumb that might help (YMMV, I'm not your lawyer, etc.): A) Keep emails and other documents for as long as you think you'll have a business need for them -- and keep in mind that sometimes the law mandates specific retention periods for certain categories of document; B) If there's a non-trivial possibility of a lawsuit that would be even remotely related to the subject matter of the emails or other documents, then don't destroy them without first checking with your lawyer. As the saying goes, sometimes the cover-up --- whether real, or simply the product of opposing counsel's "spin" --- is worse than the crime. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

tompagenet2 15y ago

Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width. Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird

sp332 15y ago
I think the hinting on this font is broken in Chrome for some reason.
benhoyt 15y ago
Yeah, those are terrible letter shapes. It happens in IE8 on Windows XP for me too.

DevX101 15y ago

How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails?

jamesaguilar 15y ago
Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit, per standard practice.

goodspeller 15y ago

what a disgrase! can't even spell "quiet"!

shill 15y ago

The 'e' in email is short for 'evidence'. Little known fact.

DrJokepu 15y ago

This wasn't really a secret, many people in the phonographic industry (including some at the record labels themselves) knew or suspected for quite a while that Grooveshark's business plan was something like this.

code_duck 15y ago

This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails. They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy' ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing, from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to shake up that industry.

paulhauggis 15y ago
"Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts." VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN?
- psychotik 15y ago
  The artist-label relationship is similar to entrepreneur-VC relationship in more than just this one regard. Angels/incubators are like indie labels, and the relationship there is slightly less skewed, but most parallels still exist.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride? So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo. So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.

__abc 15y ago

Beware what you put in any medium that can be retransmitted without your permissions :)

feralchimp 15y ago

"Rude reminder that one needs to be very careful when sending emails"...when one is a shady-ass character up to some shady-ass shit. This is less of a business plan than it is a hedge fund betting on one side of a race condition. The bet is that user growth will outpace successful litigation against the investment. It would be less ethically problematic if they were doing the piracy themselves instead of croudsourcing it.

billpatrianakos 15y ago

What a dumb move. I'm really interested to know who the recipient was. This isn't about watching what you write more so than just being judicious about what information you choose to share and with whom you share it. That segment of email made the email's author sound condescending and made the business itself look shady. I personally don't see any problem with that business model at all but there will be people who read it in a condescending tone. One last thing, the spelling. How in the world does anyone who wants to be taken seriously get away with that sort of spelling? Especially if you're running a business. Slang and shorthand are for teenage texts, not emails from high level execs. I'm a high level executive myself. I'm the CEO/Founder/President of my $20k/yr business that has its office based in my living room and even I wouldn't let that happen in an email from me or anyone representing the work I do. The way you speak and write reflects on you in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a hillbilly.

ricardobeat 15y ago
I'm usually one to wince upon these mistakes, but for all I know a Nobel Prize winner could be a hillbilly. Some people like to use their time to get things done instead of worrying about grammar. It takes some time to accept that.
darklajid 15y ago
Spelling: I for one couldn't parse it. I stumbled a handful of times and just stopped reading, looked at the comments here instead. Looked like a kid texting to me.
- billpatrianakos 15y ago
  Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point. I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

> Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can. Clearly the lesson here is that you need to spellcheck carefully before sending out your emails.