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Deny This, Last.fm
- pg 17y agoI wonder if this will get as many upvotes as Last.fm's linkbait denial. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491750 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=491750 I'm happy to say that I personally see an uparrow next to that item.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- swombat 17y agoWell, 401 of us don't... But just because we voted it up doesn't mean we sided with last.fm. Sometimes, I vote things up because I think they are of interest. That reply was clearly of great interest - as is this article.
- access_denied 17y agoI thought upvoting should be that way: one upvotes submissions one deems interesting to the HN community as a whole - not to pick sites on an argument. Did I miss something?
- tvon 17y agoAm I misreading something or is that exactly what swombat just said?
- pg 17y agoYes, good point.
- gruseom 17y agoI voted it up and did side with last.fm (at the time), because I never dreamt they could issue a denial like that and actually be lying, in spirit if not in letter. God am I naive sometimes.
- vaksel 17y agoeven in this article, techcrunch mentions twitter.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- kleevr 17y agotl;dr: too drunk to even care; so be it HN, I think I'm almost done here; feels like a fair mention, so I'll push the point and a-void your convention.
- kleevr 17y agoMy bad, the Nausea hit the night before. It's funny, I wasn't crazy about the fade-out feature (Though, I did find it witty as hell.), but after pulling a ctrl-a on the above... well I'm actually a huge fan of it these days! ;)
- smhinsey 17y ago> We’d like to provide you with legal counsel at our cost. You know, I don't always see eye to eye with Michael Arrington, but that is a remarkable offer, and I applaud his honorable deed. (I hope I don't end up eating my words after some sort of scandal.)
- sachinag 17y agoIANAL, but there are a number of issues here: 1) Whistleblower statutes generally only apply when exposing criminal contract, not a civil liability (as with a violation of a company's Privacy Policy). 2) I wouldn't want to figure out which state or states' laws apply - you'd probably want counsel in at least DE, NY, and CA (and maybe DC as well) 3) Third party payments may weaken attorney-client privilege 4) The interests of TechCrunch and the fired employee may not necessarily be aligned, although that's hard to predict through what would ostensibly be years of litigation. 5) If it takes years, TechCrunch's appetite to continue to pay counsel could weaken Look, I appreciate the sentiment, but I wouldn't take that offer if I were the fired employee. If Arrington wanted to help the guy, he'd give him a job. [EDIT: Arrington is a lawyer, although non-practicing, so I'm going to hope that he's thought through all this and that I'm wrong on some of the facts. He's, at the very least, smart enough not to represent TC himself. A fool for a client and all that.]
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- smhinsey 17y ago[Sorry, my original reply was so incoherent that I wanted to delete it before it caused any trouble, I couldn't even find a salvageable edit.] I'm not a lawyer either, but if I were in this guy's position, I would make sure I was as well informed as I could be and take advice wherever I could get it. If it was free, all the better. I would seek out a second opinion if it started to look like multi-year litigation or something scary. To address your opinions on what constitutes help, I am not really sure how it bears on the matter.
- 17y ago
- knightinblue 17y agoWierdly enough, the original last.fm story also broke late friday night. Is there a reason for the timing? Other than coincidence of course.
- ciscoriordan 17y agoThis is Memorial Day weekend too.
- jkincaid 17y agoThink it's just coincidence. Fridays/weekends tend to have less breaking news so we have more time to do more involved posts.
- alexfarran 17y agoObviously to give the victim less opportunity to respond promptly to the slanderous story.
- batasrki 17y agoWhat makes this story slanderous? Do you have proof that it is so? If not, you're just trolling and you should know better.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- dantheman 17y agoThis is pretty serious; if true, they just lost a lot of credibility. A mistake people can understand, lying or intentionally misleading people is burning bridges you can't easily get back... I gave the benefit of the doubt, if it turns out this is what they did i'm deleting my account...
- smhinsey 17y agoI actually deleted mine when I first heard this story, then heard their denials, wasn't sure, and spent a period of time thinking "well, that was kind of dumb, look before you leap next time" because my account dated back to the audioscrobbler days and had a lot of data. Now I feel somewhat vindicated but even more disappointed.
- Oompa 17y agoYeah I did the same thing with my really old account, and just last week made a new account…
- j2d2 17y agoPeople said the same thing about yelp when they were caught suppressing negative reviews and that didn't seem to slow them down...
- geuis 17y agoI am kind of ashamed that the company I work at is part of CBS Interactive. I like the people that I work with. At least our group is in no way affiliated with what's going on here.
- ubernostrum 17y agoI'm sorry, does anybody at all think Arrington has any credibility left? If he broke the story that the sky is blue I'd be suspicious of it.
- SwellJoe 17y agoHe actually has pretty good credibility. You may not like him. Many people don't, for various reasons, though I'm not among them...I think he's usually extremely nice to the folks he ought to be nice to: small, early stage, startups; and harder on the folks that are able to defend themselves, like well-funded startups and Google and Facebook. Sure, he's made a few douche moves over the years, like laying the blame for the financial crisis on a bunch of kids who went to Greece for vacation and made a music video, for example. But Arrington and TC aren't in the habit of just making stuff up.
- ubernostrum 17y agoI tend to view TC as the National Enquirer of tech, and possessing roughly the same credibility. It mainly reports overblown startup gossip and AFAICT tends to be about as accurate as you'd expect such information to be (e.g., the approximately 9.5x10^53 companies which have been reported by TC in "late stage talks" to acquire Twitter). Also: having known a couple people involved in stories reported by TC, I believe quite honestly that they do just "make stuff up". There's no other way to get from the actual facts to the reported "story".
- froo 17y agoWell as the saying goes, there's three sides to every story. Yours, Mine and the truth So just because you know someone involved in some stories, doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the whole truth either. Arrington can grate me a lot of the time, some of his stories are overblown, a lot can be fairly interesting and he knows when to eat humble pie as required. You may not like the man, but he writes what people want and he hits home runs more often than he strikes out.
- 17y ago
- wallflower 17y agoI remember reading this comment on TC under the Fotolia $50-100M funding story yesterday: "Is this the same exceptionally good source that told you that Last.fm handed user data over to the RIAA?" Reply by Michael Arrington (@arrington) - May 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm PDT last fm story was right. continues to be right.
- geirfreysson 17y agoA lot of companies/founders aspire to be acquired. This is the downside of that. I have a lot of sympathy for Last.fm in this scenario.
- ableal 17y agoCompanies with VC money have to be acquired - by another company or the public (via IPO). The VCs must have their exit - their funds are not for long term investment.
- geirfreysson 17y agoThat's totally true. I guess the lesson is that it matters who acquires you. If you can't go for the public, cross your fingers and hope your parent company won't do anything evil.
- llimllib 17y agoIs there any way to punish a company that violates its privacy agreement? In the hypothetical sense, not talking about this case in particular.
- froo 17y agoFiring it's founders out of a large cannon into the sun gets my vote, in a hypothetical sense.
- Dilpil 17y agoI'm surprised he shows a screenshot of the email. Is a screenshot at all better than a verbal account, given how easy to fake the screenshot in question would be?
- trickjarrett 17y agoWhat other option does he have? He's going to face criticisms and calls that he's lying whether he does or doesn't show a screencap of the email.
- Dilpil 17y agoExactly, so why bother showing the email at all?
- froo 17y agoWell, for one thing, it lends more credibility to the story. But to go on your initial point, why bother writing a follow up piece at all? Because that's what it takes to make a blog that people want to read. As far as they know, the source has been reliable in the past. The source provided them with a good story, they published it and the companies in question danced a jig to make TC out to appear like a bunch of liars. If the story is correct, last.fm providing the information to CBS who then turned it over to the RIAA is essentially the same thing as last.fm giving the information to the RIAA. If its not correct, people will call Michael out on it, no big deal - it's what gets readers. It's the same situation that makes abominations like Perez Hilton exist... people thrive on drama. Drama drives traffic, traffic creates revenue.
- tvon 17y ago> Last.fm didn’t hand user data over to the RIAA. According to our source, it was their parent company, CBS, that did it. So the original story was was admittedly wrong?
- chairface 17y agoI believe the phrase he used was "materially correct". Which it was. User data that originated at last.fm was given to the RIAA. It's hard to say the original story was flat wrong.
- philh 17y agoWrong on a technicality, but not wrong enough. last.fm may not have directly handed anything over, but they unintentionally collaborated in handing it over, and then (I consider this the key point) they attempted to deny that the handover happened.
- tvon 17y agoI agree in a sane conversation, but it just seems like the sort of thing that TC would jump all over.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tsally 17y agoBah, Tech Crunch did something I'm actually proud of.
- staticshock 17y agooddly enough, if RIAA sues everyone who scrobbled pre-release stuff on last.fm, they don't gain anything. it won't stop file sharing, it'll just stop scrobbling, leading to a less representative statistical sample of people's listening habits. that'll hurt last.fm and RIAA more than anyone else.
- froo 17y agoSorry to go grammar police on the writer of the original email (see screenshot), but its "their" not "there" when talking about their "pov" Also, glad to see Michael fix it in the quote, although then technically the quote is wrong :)
- zimbabwe 17y agoHow is the RIAA using this to find people who pirate music? Doesn't it look the same as normal music?
- samlittlewood 17y agoI think the accusation was that they were looking for people who had scrobbled the as yet unreleased U2 album.
- zimbabwe 17y agoAh! I guess I missed that.
- danw 17y agoThe implications from requesting ip addresses appears to be attempting to find the original leak source, ie the earliest scrobbles not accountable to journalists, execs. (This is a guess, not something I know)
- danw 17y agoWhat's the legality of last.fm transferring any data from it's UK servers to CBS in the US, under EU data protection?
- alexfarran 17y agoWell in his response Russ Garret says its against data protection laws to transfer personally identifiable data.
- vidarh 17y agoUnless things have changed in the last couple of years that is only true if the US entity has not agreed to certain "safe harbor" provisions that essentially means they guarantees to treat the data in the same way as if they were subject to EU law.
- sounddust 17y agoLast.fm response: http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/_/9521312 http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/_/9521312
- radu_floricica 17y agoIt would help if somewhere in there they actually said they didn't do it. edit (from the comments): >They'd still have to ask for the data linking scrobblers to IP addresses, which they have not done. Asking for that data would raise red flags on my end...
- sounddust 17y agoYes, I agree. Both TC and last.fm are speaking in non-commital terms that would allow them to easily back out of anything they said. It would be nice if last.fm just said "Neither last.fm nor CBS has ever transmitted any data to the RIAA which was not already publicly available" or something like that.
- dcurtis 17y agoScrobbing data is publicly available, so even that has holes.
- russss 17y agoI understand why my previous post would have seemed non-committal (especially when you pull out certain soundbites), so I've denied it again in stronger terms: http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/_/9525592 http://www.last.fm/forum/21717/_/535934/_/9525592
- sounddust 17y agoGreat; I think that is exactly the kind of direct statement everyone was waiting to hear. I now feel pretty much the same way about the issue as I did 3 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489805 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=489805 , although I suppose it's not just about Erick Schonfeld anymore.
- rabidsnail 17y agoI wonder how easy it would be to prove that one of the users whose data was leaked was a citizen of the EU or the state of California, which have pretty strong data privacy laws if I'm not mistaken. I smell a lawsuit.
- palish 17y agoA careful read of the post turns up very little actual information. There’s indignation over the story, indignation over us not giving them a heads up, and a statement that it’s impossible for data to be sent to CBS without Garrett’s knowledge. They also say “Any suggestion that we were complicit in transferring user data to any third party is incorrect.” We need more than that. Isn't it the accuser's job to prove that someone is guilty, rather than the defendant's job to prove his innocence? TechCrunch is still publishing this based on only a couple sources. I realize that it is hard to get even a couple sources, but what if even one of those sources is fake? Since we can't know anything about them, we have no way of validating what TechCrunch is saying.
- danw 17y agoIs there any clarifications of what exact data TC accuses of being sent? ie usernames, ip addresses?