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How can you possibly compare HN, reddit and Grooveshark? The first 2 aggregate links to content, Grooveshark distributes content (often unlicensed). That's akin

How can you possibly compare HN, reddit and Grooveshark? The first 2 aggregate links to content, Grooveshark distributes content (often unlicensed). That's akin to comparing IMDB and iTunes, because both have movie related content? It's nonsensical. If you want to use reddit as an example we'd have to pretend that reddit downloads the content from any submitted link and serves it, so let's pretend that happens: if a company went to reddit and said please stop downloading our website content when it's submitted from the domain website.com, would you do that? Would you tell them to fuck off? While profiting from that content? Grooveshark could if they wanted without any effort comply with what companies like Universal want. They choose not to. It's not about whether or not they comply with the law. It's absolutely not unreasonable for any artist to expect their music not to be on Grooveshark, Grooveshark made a business decision to use the DMCA to their advantage. > They aren't supporting Rihanna, and I'm fairly certain that they don't have to. That's fine, they don't have to support Rihanna, but what they should not then do is take her content anyway. If they're not willing to comply with the wishes/expectations of the rights holder (which probably isn't Rihanna but let's pretend it is for simplicities sake) then they SHOULD NOT be making money from that content! Grooveshark is a business that takes other peoples content WITHOUT PERMISSION and then makes money from that content and uses the DMCA to get away with it, doing the bare minimum to be compliant. How can anyone defend that?

Natsu 14y ago
It is nowhere near as easy as you suppose to filter out all unlicensed content with a computer program. If you believe otherwise, feel free to create and market such a system so that we can judge for ourselves. Google, a company who has plenty of capable coders, wrote their own such system. It misidentified birdcalls as copyrighted music: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-gets-bogus-youtube-copyright-claim-birds-singing-background.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-ge...
- citricsquid 14y ago
  if(artist.name == "Rihanna") error("You can't post Rihanna"); It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement. Sure people could upload Rihanna's music under the name "Johnny John Johnson" but then nobody would find it, so the problem would be solved. Grooveshark choose not to do this because they are driving revenue with unlicensed music.
  - Natsu 14y ago
    Congrats, you just banned Prof. Usher's lecture notes: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html You've also missed all the "Riana," "Rihana," "Rieana," etc. songs out there, making your filter both harmful to innocent people and worthless at stopping infringement. EDIT: And this part is badly mistaken: "It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement." So you have 1 copy for people to download instead of 100. But 1 is enough for everyone, so you've made no dent in piracy whatsoever, because everyone will copy the one file that is available and won't even care that there aren't 99 more copies of it.
    - citricsquid 14y ago
      Now you're just being intentionally stupid. Yes, the idea of a single if statement is over simplifying, but it's an example of how easy such a system is. If I was grooveshark and actually building such a system I would build in common song name matching (eg: If Rihanna is the artist name and the song is "Rude boy" then it's bad, if the song is "Hacker News is fun!" it's probably not! The point is, a system for matching against names of popular artists is trivial to build, are you denying that? If someone tasked you with building a system that could take an mp3 + title + artist and tell if it was the song of a popular artist in a database could you not do that?
      - Natsu 14y ago
        Searching for "usher.mp3" where the artist.name = Usher is pretty much exactly how Prof. Usher's lecture notes got DMCA'd. I'll give you credit that you could probably ban most of the typos of Rihanna, though. But the wider you cast that net, the more "dolphins" like Prof. Usher you're going to catch. And you have to cast it widely to even put a dent into things, because you only need one copy available for everyone to copy it. Just one false negative out of millions of songs and everyone copies that one that slipped through. They need exactly one search result, not 100. Google does all that you say and more on YouTube. Let me know how hard it is for you to find infringing content there (hint: not very)? Sure, they play whack-a-mole with it. But that damned mole keeps popping back up and it's not hard to find a mole that hasn't yet been whacked. Worse, the more you tighten up that code, the more Prof. Ushers you ban. We have Google blocking access to bird songs already. And I know you know how skilled their coders are. You should have at least banned the cryptographic hashes of anything that got DMCA'd. At least that has few false positives (assuming few DMCA notices are false). It's vulnerable to deliberate infringers making tiny changes to the files, sure, but I'm unaware of any solution that isn't. And you're required to ban anyone who is a repeat infringer anyhow. But we're playing whack-a-mole. More moles always pop up.

Natsu 14y ago

It is nowhere near as easy as you suppose to filter out all unlicensed content with a computer program. If you believe otherwise, feel free to create and market such a system so that we can judge for ourselves. Google, a company who has plenty of capable coders, wrote their own such system. It misidentified birdcalls as copyrighted music: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-gets-bogus-youtube-copyright-claim-birds-singing-background.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120227/00152917884/guy-ge...

citricsquid 14y ago
if(artist.name == "Rihanna") error("You can't post Rihanna"); It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement. Sure people could upload Rihanna's music under the name "Johnny John Johnson" but then nobody would find it, so the problem would be solved. Grooveshark choose not to do this because they are driving revenue with unlicensed music.
- Natsu 14y ago
  Congrats, you just banned Prof. Usher's lecture notes: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1025_3-1001095.html You've also missed all the "Riana," "Rihana," "Rieana," etc. songs out there, making your filter both harmful to innocent people and worthless at stopping infringement. EDIT: And this part is badly mistaken: "It doesn't need to be sophisticated to remove 99% cases of infringement." So you have 1 copy for people to download instead of 100. But 1 is enough for everyone, so you've made no dent in piracy whatsoever, because everyone will copy the one file that is available and won't even care that there aren't 99 more copies of it.
  - citricsquid 14y ago
    Now you're just being intentionally stupid. Yes, the idea of a single if statement is over simplifying, but it's an example of how easy such a system is. If I was grooveshark and actually building such a system I would build in common song name matching (eg: If Rihanna is the artist name and the song is "Rude boy" then it's bad, if the song is "Hacker News is fun!" it's probably not! The point is, a system for matching against names of popular artists is trivial to build, are you denying that? If someone tasked you with building a system that could take an mp3 + title + artist and tell if it was the song of a popular artist in a database could you not do that?
    - Natsu 14y ago
      Searching for "usher.mp3" where the artist.name = Usher is pretty much exactly how Prof. Usher's lecture notes got DMCA'd. I'll give you credit that you could probably ban most of the typos of Rihanna, though. But the wider you cast that net, the more "dolphins" like Prof. Usher you're going to catch. And you have to cast it widely to even put a dent into things, because you only need one copy available for everyone to copy it. Just one false negative out of millions of songs and everyone copies that one that slipped through. They need exactly one search result, not 100. Google does all that you say and more on YouTube. Let me know how hard it is for you to find infringing content there (hint: not very)? Sure, they play whack-a-mole with it. But that damned mole keeps popping back up and it's not hard to find a mole that hasn't yet been whacked. Worse, the more you tighten up that code, the more Prof. Ushers you ban. We have Google blocking access to bird songs already. And I know you know how skilled their coders are. You should have at least banned the cryptographic hashes of anything that got DMCA'd. At least that has few false positives (assuming few DMCA notices are false). It's vulnerable to deliberate infringers making tiny changes to the files, sure, but I'm unaware of any solution that isn't. And you're required to ban anyone who is a repeat infringer anyhow. But we're playing whack-a-mole. More moles always pop up.