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How Apple Influenced The Labels To Shut Down My Music Streaming Startup

303 points by meeper16 11y ago

JohnyLy 11y ago
This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should be penalised the same way Microsoft did (With huge fines) or I think of another way: forcing large companies to work with startups instead of shutting them down.
- jevgeni 11y ago
  1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - zlnimda 11y ago
    Ethics and moral is regulated in some countries, because it's part of the law. USA are so retarded on that point, that's all. And people who buys Apple products doesn't care what could do that company just because they are inspired by all the ads and hype around their products.
    - rimantas 11y ago
      I'd argue that Apple has done more positive and socially responsible thing than many other big (and small) companies. And generally people buy Apple products because they are great products. You can only fool once with advertising, however people keep using Apple.
    - jevgeni 11y ago
      You mean like, who is allowed to marry, who has the right to vote, and so on? Yeah, those countries are the pinnacle of human progress.
    - jevgeni 11y ago
      And furthermore, how people who are too retarded to see through the ads and hype are competent enough to enact moral-based laws?
  - rimantas 11y ago
    Was Apple ever a monopoly? And just being a monopoly is not illegal.
    - jevgeni 11y ago
      No, I don't think they ever were. I just wanted to be precise in my previous comment and reference the time the article is set in. Yes, there are legal monopolies, of course. But not if it's a retail product.
      - corin_ 11y ago
        Of course you can have a monopoly on a retail product, how else could anyone ever introduce a new type of product to the market?
        jevgeni 11y ago
        No. Monopoly is a form of market organization. Having a uniquely specific product doesn't make it a monopoly. If I introduce a new five-wheeled bicycle to the market, that doesn't mean I have a monopoly on the bicycle market.
        corin_ 11y ago
        No, monopoly is about being the only one doing something, not about "marketing organization". If you invent the first bicycle and nobody else makes them then you do indeed have a monopoly on the bicycle market. The difference is just that we define "bicycle" as the market, not "5-wheeled bicycle".
        marrs 11y ago
        or a pentacycle :) https://horshamphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_5259.jpg https://horshamphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_5...
        11y ago
- geofft 11y ago
  I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law. Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option. If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them. (Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    >there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law It is very fascinating to me still how the threads in HN tend to always reveal a much larger picture than the tone of the original piece. These discussions often have more insight than the articles that everyone is making popular!
  - gutnor 11y ago
    > Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. There is an illustration of that. Big companies using a lot of contractors normally go through intermediary contractor agencies simply to avoid the risk that the contractor become legally recognized as employee. The cost of those intermediaries can be as much as an extra 20% of the contractor rate - that's significant. As a small startup, initially Uber could operate directly with contractor driver and save that amount. Now they are a big company and the news in California illustrate the kind of risk the intermediary agencies are shielding big business from.
- briandear 11y ago
  Did Apple 'make' Warner sue anyone? Remember, the labels held most of the cards.. They controlled the content. If Apple had all of this great power over the labels, why did it take so long to get the Beatles? As far as 'more regulation' -- I don't like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. The government uses regulation as a hammer with which to crush companies that don't tie a certain line. Excessive regulation also adds tremendous costs to a company and therefore the consumers. Do you know how big of a legal department is needed just to comply with government regulations? It's a non-trivial cost. I am not saying regulation is bad; I am saying that beyond Sherman, the government ought not be too heavily involved in regulating competition because then only the politically connected or heavy contributors get permission to thrive. Carlos Slim, for example didn't get rich because of a lack of regulation in Mexican telecoms, he became a billionaire because of regulation: Mexico gave him essentially a multi-year head start over potential competitors using regulatory power. The result, Mexican telecom service is highly expensive and of marginal quality. With less regulation other companies could have started offering services sooner and competition would have driven market innovation.
  - ectoplasm 11y ago
    > If Apple had all of this great power over the labels, why did it take so long to get the Beatles? That was a trademark dispute, see Apple vs. Apple.
    - huxley 11y ago
      Actually it was a dispute between EMI and Apple Corps (not invoking Apple Computer Inc) over royalties that held up the Beatles music licensing.
      - ectoplasm 11y ago
        Oh, I see. Thanks. When was it settled? Apple vs. Apple was settled in 2007. I would be surprised if the trademark dispute had no bearing on the licensing dispute internally, but I guess we can't know.
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  I mean, dude, seriously... what? by no means I am an apple fan, never owned any of their device (mainly because how they treat their customers, but that's completely different topic) and still living, but - case is clear simple here. Apple paid owners of copyright agreed amount, and startup was stealing this content without anyone's approval. I don't care who gave list to whom, etc. Justice has been done. If you don't like copyright laws, that's again another story altogether. No rocket science...
dangero 11y ago
I kept waiting for the payoff, but the article never gave proof that Steve Jobs was behind it. Sounds to me like what happened is that Steve when negotiating with Warner Brothers said something like, "How can you charge us those rates for your music when I have a whole list of places online that have it for free?" At which point Warner said, "We'll take care of those. So the rates can stand."
- meeper16 11y ago
  Fairly clear here: "During one of these breaks I was by myself in the office of the CTO. He came in and we chatted about the state of technology and music. I then thought to ask a question of which the answer would shed light on the real reason behind the litigation and contention technology companies share with old media companies. I asked Howie, why is it that Warner chose to sue SeeqPod? He said that they maintained a short list of companies and we were on top of that list. I then asked how we wound up on the list and at the top. This is when he mentioned that Steve Jobs had held meetings with several labels including Warner and disagreed with streaming music services like SeeqPod and that companies like ours would inhibit a deal between Apple and the labels, so they collectively decided to keep a running list of “problem” companies that need to be “addressed” by Warner. It was at this point I realized we were not in a fight with the labels but in a proxy war waged by Apple against innovative music technology companies."
  - hamburglar 11y ago
    This sounds like the same thing dangero is referring to.
  - geofft 11y ago
    Yeah, you can interpret that the way that dangero did. I think the interesting thing there is that streaming music services of that era (including Internet radio) were generally unlicensed and operating on slightly-questionable interpretations of copyright law that had them paying nothing. So, if Jobs' complaint was that there are these other companies that weren't paying a cent, and could play music anyway (including on Jobs' devices), that would "inhibit a deal" because it wouldn't be rational for Apple to pay either. Depends, as always, what "innovative" means. Are cities against innovation in transportation? If the innovative thing is ignoring regulations that nobody else has thought to ignore, then yes, of course they are. (As with copyright, it's not obvious that the regulations are good, but they are what's on the books.)
dxhdr 11y ago
I read this half asleep and a little inebriated but it seemed to evolve into some kind of bizarre self-aggrandizing pitch on how this Kasian Franks is a super-human with deep hard-to-duplicate knowledge and insights spanning multiple important and lucrative industries. Almost some kind of cred piece bolstered by his proxy encounter with Steve Jobs. Weird.
- hamburglar 11y ago
  I agree, although I think he sort of predisposed me to this attitude right off the bat with the desperate-seeming link to google results that are supposed to prove people called them an "itunes killer" (note: I could not find a single instance of anyone referring to them as an "itunes killer" in any of those results).
  - smcgivern 11y ago
    In fact, the first result (which is duplicated several times) is calling Songbird an 'iTunes killer' - quotes included - and mentions Seeqpod as one of the plugins, saying: > it expands your library exponentially, assuming you’re down with the kind of quasi-legality involved
    - marrs 11y ago
      I'd forgotten all about Songbird. I kept coming back to that app but I never managed to stay. I always felt I should like much better than I actually did.
  - rimantas 11y ago
    Being called "{Apple product there} killer" never turned out to be good for the "killer" involved.
    - Polecat 11y ago
      Or anything "killer" in general. As evident by every MMORPG that is coming out being the "World of Warcraft killer" an then disappearing into obscurity after a few months of hype while WoW keeps on going.
Libermentix 11y ago
I actually like the second part of the article a lot more intriguing where he talks about his and the company's personal background. It's these stories that inspire to start a company.
npp 11y ago
This article reminds me of a lot of what Dalton Caldwell spoke about in his talk about why not to start a music startup at a Startup School in the last several years. This business seems to have been run and have proceeded horribly, for the exact reasons that Caldwell and everyone else with experience in that area seems to be extremely familiar with. Is there anything legitimately interesting to the "Apple" and "Steve Jobs" parts of this story other than the usual clickbait?
- marrs 11y ago
  I found it interesting to see how - if the story is true - your enemies may not be who they appear to be. He thought the labels hated his business whereas they may have actually been quite partial to it in slightly different circumstances. That's useful to know for when your circumstances change.
brianmcconnell 11y ago
TL;DR Music technology startups suck.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This is not a very HN comment even if true.
  - sjwright 11y ago
    Silicon Valley s1 e4: So Pied Piper, drop it on me. What is it? Well, we started off as a music app. Yuck. Yeah. Gross. Ugh.
  - kowdermeister 11y ago
    It's a brianmcconnell comment. Why should anybody act like a hive mind? His comment is quite true. I been there, done that.
    - danieltillett 11y ago
      Yes we know, but we are supposed to not be negative here even if what is said is true :)
brianmcconnell 11y ago
TL;DR Music technology startups suck.
jevgeni 11y ago
Whoever uses "analyzation" publicly deserves to have a failed start up.
billpg 11y ago
I'd feel smug about my choice of cell phone but Samsung sponsored the Olympics.
amelius 11y ago
Hint: when you start a service solving a very generic problem, you have a big chance of being outmaneuvered by a competitor.
- morganvachon 11y ago
  He touches on that when he goes into his background. He worked on a project in the mid 90s that was duplicated by a competitor and sold to Yahoo. "I then moved to Sun Micro-Electronics (SME) and that’s where I learned one of my most valuable lessons. I began to build and ship the first HTTP-based (yes, this was a thing back then) stock ticker and called it DigitalTrader in 1996 (http://goo.gl/dQzPTC http://goo.gl/dQzPTC) It was built in Tcl/Tk and Java/Tk. It auto-updated itself and crawled Quote.com and Yahoo for data. Six months later a competitor duplicated it and Yahoo bought them and put us out of business overnight. Lesson learned: realize when you are doing something that is easily duplicated. "
  - amelius 11y ago
    This is something else. A ticker tape is a niche product (not what I would call "generic"). Also, the lesson learned is about something which is easily duplicated, and this does not have to apply (in general) to a generic product.
musesum 11y ago
I saw Kasian Franks speak at a meetup in Oct 2007. A friend suggested that I check out SeeqPod since I had worked at an earlier music streaming startup. As I recall, he made a negative comment about the labels, near the end. His position seemed precarious. Warner sued a couple months later.
digital-rubber 11y ago
It reads like a childs' (seeqpod) argument to a parent (the public @HN) trying to blame the (older, bigger, wiser) sibling (apple).
tantalor 11y ago
Can somebody with background on the law please explain how this is or isn't an anti-competitive practice? i.e., Warner Bros sues Apple's rival at Apple's request.
- InfiniteEntropy 11y ago
  Because in America its only anti-competitive if you can't pay off the people who decide if it is.
  - s73v3r 11y ago
    Care to point out where this guy's startup was paying royalties for the music streamed?
- lnanek2 11y ago
  Well, reading the article, this guy had an illegal business finding illegal music on the internet for people to play for free they didn't have rights to. A label sued him. The end. Apple doesn't have much to do with it. They had a legal music business and negotiated to pay the labels, as they should, since the labels own the music rights. They and the labels correctly figured out their competitors were illegal, and they sued. Should you not be able to sue someone doing something illegal just because they are in the same business as you?
- s73v3r 11y ago
  For one, there's no actual evidence that actually happened.
guelo 11y ago
They were crawling the web for mp3s the same way that Google does. Though admittedly Google hides the mp3s much better nowadays then they used to. And the web is way more balkanized into all these corporate walled gardens so there are fewer free roaming mp3s on random websites as there used to be. But technically it was a search engine the same as Google. It always bothers me that this area of the law seems to be entirely based on judges' interpretation of the purpose of a UI. A UI is illegal if it guides the user towards the illegal action. If it is possible to perform the illegal action but the user has to put in a little thought into how to accomplish it then the UI is legal. Google can't have a file-type search box with an mp3 option but if users know the right incantation they can achieve the same thing. So we have lawyers telling us how we can build UIs. It seems wrong and like a dangerous slippery slope.
- mbrownnyc 11y ago
  Interesting point! Worth noting that I do think that this is what lawyers _really_ do. They smudge the gray area to their will, and with enough effort, they make some sort of progress towards their client's bidding. Worth noting, even with the existence of Tomahawk and youtube... and napalm indexer, soulseek, and torrentz.eu, I still felt that it was much easier to pay for Spotify than to drill through the tendrils of the Internet. I had time when I was a poor college student/post-college "adult," but I figured semi-efficiently pirating music for 20 years (yes on a 56k modem as well), I'd rather just popcorntime it and go. Where is the popcorntime for music anyway? Does Tomahawk count at this?
- notahacker 11y ago
  I was under the impression that the UI was pretty incidental in most judges' interpretations that platforms used mainly to locate copyrighted material were on shakier ground than platforms which incidentally, and despite ostensibly significant efforts on the part of developers to limit it, could be used to locate copyright material. It's not like Google doesn't get hit by content-provider lawsuits either, it's just that they're big enough to usually get a settlement agreed on favourable terms and far too big to be bankrupted by legal costs, which is a wider and more general problem with litigation. Ironically I'm writing this listening to YouTube streaming in the background: a far superior free way to locate and listen to music without paying for it than most of the early pirate platforms ever could have hoped to be.
72deluxe 11y ago
" If I could compile and debug kernel issues along with X11 X86Config files with assistance from a good friend at the QNX-based Caprica Internet in LA and the 2-person Slackware “helpdesk” on the East Coast every few days then I’d be able to continue to test NCSA webserver over SLIP and PPP to deliver electronic faxes with a web interface for the Mosaic Browser for a sugar company in Marin County to save them a few thousand a month in fax fees to China. " How does one "debug" X11 config files? I had to do that when it hated my monitor and rubbish graphics card but that sentence appears like complete and utter rubbish. EDIT: For clarification for those disposed to downvote, looking through an XF86 config file is not rocket science.
- IshKebab 11y ago
  Maybe modern Xorg config files are not rocket science, but surely you remember the days of manually listing video modes, and trying endless combinations of video drivers. Hell I think you even needed to add special directives to get three button mice to work properly. Fortunately those days are gone, but you definitely could debug xf86 config files.
  - JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    It wasn't so much debugging as it was laying our your video card and monitor manual, listing the config file and making sure all the little numbers match up.
    - nitrogen 11y ago
      The coolest thing one could do with a legacy XF86 config and a CRT monitor was invent new "overclocked" video modes. I had one monitor that was rated for 1280x1024 running at 1600x600 to match another monitor for a Xinerama setup.
    - IshKebab 11y ago
      ... and then debugging when it inevitably didn't work.
  - 11y ago
JustSomeNobody 11y ago
"We had 50M monthly active users and 250M searches every month. Steve Jobs told the labels, including Warner Music, to sue us. So they did and for $40B. How do I know? I know because Steve Jobs gave them a list of music streaming sites that were competitive threats to iTunes, and told them to take care of it." Citation needed. Or did I miss it amongst the self-aggrandizing?
- agentultra 11y ago
  He named an engineer at Warner Music as his source.
  - jasonlotito 11y ago
    The "engineer" being Howie Singer, the CTO of Warner Music.
skrowl 11y ago
Apple knows that they can't compete in the market, so they try to compete in the courtroom instead. It's the same reason they tried suing Samsung for such frivolous stuff as "icons with rounded rectangles" and "over-scroll rubber banding". That said, HN is pretty much an echo chamber of Apple fans, so you're unlikely to get many here to admit that they do anything wrong.
- sosborn 11y ago
  > Apple knows that they can't compete in the market Have you been paying attention at all the past 10+ years? Please explain they success they have had and how it came from their courtroom escapades.
milesskorpen 11y ago
". I also spent time through the years developing algorithms and predictive analytics associated to uncovering patterns in historical stock market data. " A bizarre comment — did he expect to see it coming? How does this relate to the story at hand? "Somehow, even someone as sophisticated as me, didn't see the downturn coming" ... if he could predict any kind of change in the stock industry better than investing professionals he wouldn't be running a questionably-legal streaming startup.
- TheCowboy 11y ago
  He's expressing that he didn't see it coming: Even with this knowledge base I failed to pay attention to what I knew was a deep systematic fissure in the financial markets signaled by the fall of Bear Stearns. I was focused on user acquisition, growth and resolving litigation as opposed to revenue, a mistake when the Black Swan appears. He's not claiming to have the ability to time markets perfectly. He had enough experience where he might have some awareness of the bigger economic and financial picture. He's saying that even people in the financial industry were caught off guard, especially investing professionals who are key to keeping startups funded. I found this context to be the most interesting part in addition to the role of how companies behaved in an oligopolistic way. It could also be taken as an argument for greater financial transparency, or recognizing that the stability of the financial sector is another risk to startups and innovation.
  - nsgi 11y ago
    It doesn't seem to say whether he had any further success with that approach, other than predicting one event which may have been a coincidence.
lectrick 11y ago
So they intelligently crawled the web for music files to download which were... not purchased. The reason why they failed is because they, like many others, were "nebulously/quasi legal." (You know what was ALSO awesome yet not legal or respectful of creator pay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy .) At least Apple was trying to make it all legit. They did start with DRM (note: no longer the case for years) but this was to make the record companies more comfortable with it. The reason why SeeqPod was sued is because Warner Music (and others) had a case. It was not a purely frivolous, harassing lawsuit.
phkahler 11y ago
Being a search engine for independents seems like a good idea. It's another area where eliminating anonymity can help. The problem for someone in that business is people putting stuff they don't own into the system and getting them sued. By making people more accountable that problem should go away. People on the web today are not really anonymous and not really identifiable either. I think we need to fix both of those problems.

303 points by meeper16 11y ago

This is why large companies should be more regulated. They should not be able to put pressure on labels or producers and get all the benefits. What Apple did by killing this startup is not ethical. Plus, by killing it, they tried to get a monopole. Microsoft got so many fines at the time because they had the monopole on PCs. If a large company tries to destroy startups just because they feel threatened, they should be penalised the same way Microsoft did (With huge fines) or I think of another way: forcing large companies to work with startups instead of shutting them down.

jevgeni 11y ago
1. Apple was not a monopoly at that time. 2. How do you rigorously tell, which company is big and which is small? 3. This is a competitive market and ethics is not something that should be regulated. If people have a problem with a company's ethics, they should just stop using their products.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- zlnimda 11y ago
  Ethics and moral is regulated in some countries, because it's part of the law. USA are so retarded on that point, that's all. And people who buys Apple products doesn't care what could do that company just because they are inspired by all the ads and hype around their products.
  - rimantas 11y ago
    I'd argue that Apple has done more positive and socially responsible thing than many other big (and small) companies. And generally people buy Apple products because they are great products. You can only fool once with advertising, however people keep using Apple.
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    You mean like, who is allowed to marry, who has the right to vote, and so on? Yeah, those countries are the pinnacle of human progress.
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    And furthermore, how people who are too retarded to see through the ads and hype are competent enough to enact moral-based laws?
- rimantas 11y ago
  Was Apple ever a monopoly? And just being a monopoly is not illegal.
  - jevgeni 11y ago
    No, I don't think they ever were. I just wanted to be precise in my previous comment and reference the time the article is set in. Yes, there are legal monopolies, of course. But not if it's a retail product.
    - corin_ 11y ago
      Of course you can have a monopoly on a retail product, how else could anyone ever introduce a new type of product to the market?
      - jevgeni 11y ago
        No. Monopoly is a form of market organization. Having a uniquely specific product doesn't make it a monopoly. If I introduce a new five-wheeled bicycle to the market, that doesn't mean I have a monopoly on the bicycle market.
        corin_ 11y ago
        No, monopoly is about being the only one doing something, not about "marketing organization". If you invent the first bicycle and nobody else makes them then you do indeed have a monopoly on the bicycle market. The difference is just that we define "bicycle" as the market, not "5-wheeled bicycle".
        marrs 11y ago
        or a pentacycle :) https://horshamphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_5259.jpg https://horshamphotography.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/img_5...
        11y ago
geofft 11y ago
I didn't downvote you, but I suspect you're being downvoted because there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law. Large companies are more regulated in that regard: Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. Startups can afford to do this because the risk is that they shut down, the founders walk away basically intact because of the corporate veil, and nobody else is affected. Apple doesn't have that option. If Apple were forced to work with the startup, the startup would have to adopt the same risk profile and approach to the law as Apple. Arguably, that's exactly what happened here, through Apple calling attention to them. (Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on whether the law is correct. It is what it is. I hear good reasons to believe that Aereo was wrongly decided, but they still took a legally risky approach and lost at the Supreme Court, and the option for an orderly shutdown via bankruptcy existed because they were a startup doing nothing else.)
- hellofunk 11y ago
  >there's a growing suspicion in these comments that this startup was breaking the law It is very fascinating to me still how the threads in HN tend to always reveal a much larger picture than the tone of the original piece. These discussions often have more insight than the articles that everyone is making popular!
- gutnor 11y ago
  > Apple can't deploy a questionably-legal music streaming service as easily as a startup can. There is an illustration of that. Big companies using a lot of contractors normally go through intermediary contractor agencies simply to avoid the risk that the contractor become legally recognized as employee. The cost of those intermediaries can be as much as an extra 20% of the contractor rate - that's significant. As a small startup, initially Uber could operate directly with contractor driver and save that amount. Now they are a big company and the news in California illustrate the kind of risk the intermediary agencies are shielding big business from.
briandear 11y ago
Did Apple 'make' Warner sue anyone? Remember, the labels held most of the cards.. They controlled the content. If Apple had all of this great power over the labels, why did it take so long to get the Beatles? As far as 'more regulation' -- I don't like the idea of the government picking winners and losers. The government uses regulation as a hammer with which to crush companies that don't tie a certain line. Excessive regulation also adds tremendous costs to a company and therefore the consumers. Do you know how big of a legal department is needed just to comply with government regulations? It's a non-trivial cost. I am not saying regulation is bad; I am saying that beyond Sherman, the government ought not be too heavily involved in regulating competition because then only the politically connected or heavy contributors get permission to thrive. Carlos Slim, for example didn't get rich because of a lack of regulation in Mexican telecoms, he became a billionaire because of regulation: Mexico gave him essentially a multi-year head start over potential competitors using regulatory power. The result, Mexican telecom service is highly expensive and of marginal quality. With less regulation other companies could have started offering services sooner and competition would have driven market innovation.
- ectoplasm 11y ago
  > If Apple had all of this great power over the labels, why did it take so long to get the Beatles? That was a trademark dispute, see Apple vs. Apple.
  - huxley 11y ago
    Actually it was a dispute between EMI and Apple Corps (not invoking Apple Computer Inc) over royalties that held up the Beatles music licensing.
    - ectoplasm 11y ago
      Oh, I see. Thanks. When was it settled? Apple vs. Apple was settled in 2007. I would be surprised if the trademark dispute had no bearing on the licensing dispute internally, but I guess we can't know.
saiya-jin 11y ago
I mean, dude, seriously... what? by no means I am an apple fan, never owned any of their device (mainly because how they treat their customers, but that's completely different topic) and still living, but - case is clear simple here. Apple paid owners of copyright agreed amount, and startup was stealing this content without anyone's approval. I don't care who gave list to whom, etc. Justice has been done. If you don't like copyright laws, that's again another story altogether. No rocket science...

dangero 11y ago

I kept waiting for the payoff, but the article never gave proof that Steve Jobs was behind it. Sounds to me like what happened is that Steve when negotiating with Warner Brothers said something like, "How can you charge us those rates for your music when I have a whole list of places online that have it for free?" At which point Warner said, "We'll take care of those. So the rates can stand."

meeper16 11y ago
Fairly clear here: "During one of these breaks I was by myself in the office of the CTO. He came in and we chatted about the state of technology and music. I then thought to ask a question of which the answer would shed light on the real reason behind the litigation and contention technology companies share with old media companies. I asked Howie, why is it that Warner chose to sue SeeqPod? He said that they maintained a short list of companies and we were on top of that list. I then asked how we wound up on the list and at the top. This is when he mentioned that Steve Jobs had held meetings with several labels including Warner and disagreed with streaming music services like SeeqPod and that companies like ours would inhibit a deal between Apple and the labels, so they collectively decided to keep a running list of “problem” companies that need to be “addressed” by Warner. It was at this point I realized we were not in a fight with the labels but in a proxy war waged by Apple against innovative music technology companies."
- hamburglar 11y ago
  This sounds like the same thing dangero is referring to.
- geofft 11y ago
  Yeah, you can interpret that the way that dangero did. I think the interesting thing there is that streaming music services of that era (including Internet radio) were generally unlicensed and operating on slightly-questionable interpretations of copyright law that had them paying nothing. So, if Jobs' complaint was that there are these other companies that weren't paying a cent, and could play music anyway (including on Jobs' devices), that would "inhibit a deal" because it wouldn't be rational for Apple to pay either. Depends, as always, what "innovative" means. Are cities against innovation in transportation? If the innovative thing is ignoring regulations that nobody else has thought to ignore, then yes, of course they are. (As with copyright, it's not obvious that the regulations are good, but they are what's on the books.)

dxhdr 11y ago

I read this half asleep and a little inebriated but it seemed to evolve into some kind of bizarre self-aggrandizing pitch on how this Kasian Franks is a super-human with deep hard-to-duplicate knowledge and insights spanning multiple important and lucrative industries. Almost some kind of cred piece bolstered by his proxy encounter with Steve Jobs. Weird.

hamburglar 11y ago
I agree, although I think he sort of predisposed me to this attitude right off the bat with the desperate-seeming link to google results that are supposed to prove people called them an "itunes killer" (note: I could not find a single instance of anyone referring to them as an "itunes killer" in any of those results).
- smcgivern 11y ago
  In fact, the first result (which is duplicated several times) is calling Songbird an 'iTunes killer' - quotes included - and mentions Seeqpod as one of the plugins, saying: > it expands your library exponentially, assuming you’re down with the kind of quasi-legality involved
  - marrs 11y ago
    I'd forgotten all about Songbird. I kept coming back to that app but I never managed to stay. I always felt I should like much better than I actually did.
- rimantas 11y ago
  Being called "{Apple product there} killer" never turned out to be good for the "killer" involved.
  - Polecat 11y ago
    Or anything "killer" in general. As evident by every MMORPG that is coming out being the "World of Warcraft killer" an then disappearing into obscurity after a few months of hype while WoW keeps on going.

Libermentix 11y ago

I actually like the second part of the article a lot more intriguing where he talks about his and the company's personal background. It's these stories that inspire to start a company.

npp 11y ago

This article reminds me of a lot of what Dalton Caldwell spoke about in his talk about why not to start a music startup at a Startup School in the last several years. This business seems to have been run and have proceeded horribly, for the exact reasons that Caldwell and everyone else with experience in that area seems to be extremely familiar with. Is there anything legitimately interesting to the "Apple" and "Steve Jobs" parts of this story other than the usual clickbait?

marrs 11y ago
I found it interesting to see how - if the story is true - your enemies may not be who they appear to be. He thought the labels hated his business whereas they may have actually been quite partial to it in slightly different circumstances. That's useful to know for when your circumstances change.

brianmcconnell 11y ago

TL;DR Music technology startups suck.

danieltillett 11y ago
This is not a very HN comment even if true.
- sjwright 11y ago
  Silicon Valley s1 e4: So Pied Piper, drop it on me. What is it? Well, we started off as a music app. Yuck. Yeah. Gross. Ugh.
- kowdermeister 11y ago
  It's a brianmcconnell comment. Why should anybody act like a hive mind? His comment is quite true. I been there, done that.
  - danieltillett 11y ago
    Yes we know, but we are supposed to not be negative here even if what is said is true :)

brianmcconnell 11y ago

TL;DR Music technology startups suck.

jevgeni 11y ago

Whoever uses "analyzation" publicly deserves to have a failed start up.

billpg 11y ago

I'd feel smug about my choice of cell phone but Samsung sponsored the Olympics.

amelius 11y ago

Hint: when you start a service solving a very generic problem, you have a big chance of being outmaneuvered by a competitor.

morganvachon 11y ago
He touches on that when he goes into his background. He worked on a project in the mid 90s that was duplicated by a competitor and sold to Yahoo. "I then moved to Sun Micro-Electronics (SME) and that’s where I learned one of my most valuable lessons. I began to build and ship the first HTTP-based (yes, this was a thing back then) stock ticker and called it DigitalTrader in 1996 (http://goo.gl/dQzPTC http://goo.gl/dQzPTC) It was built in Tcl/Tk and Java/Tk. It auto-updated itself and crawled Quote.com and Yahoo for data. Six months later a competitor duplicated it and Yahoo bought them and put us out of business overnight. Lesson learned: realize when you are doing something that is easily duplicated. "
- amelius 11y ago
  This is something else. A ticker tape is a niche product (not what I would call "generic"). Also, the lesson learned is about something which is easily duplicated, and this does not have to apply (in general) to a generic product.

musesum 11y ago

I saw Kasian Franks speak at a meetup in Oct 2007. A friend suggested that I check out SeeqPod since I had worked at an earlier music streaming startup. As I recall, he made a negative comment about the labels, near the end. His position seemed precarious. Warner sued a couple months later.

digital-rubber 11y ago

It reads like a childs' (seeqpod) argument to a parent (the public @HN) trying to blame the (older, bigger, wiser) sibling (apple).

tantalor 11y ago

Can somebody with background on the law please explain how this is or isn't an anti-competitive practice? i.e., Warner Bros sues Apple's rival at Apple's request.

InfiniteEntropy 11y ago
Because in America its only anti-competitive if you can't pay off the people who decide if it is.
- s73v3r 11y ago
  Care to point out where this guy's startup was paying royalties for the music streamed?
lnanek2 11y ago
Well, reading the article, this guy had an illegal business finding illegal music on the internet for people to play for free they didn't have rights to. A label sued him. The end. Apple doesn't have much to do with it. They had a legal music business and negotiated to pay the labels, as they should, since the labels own the music rights. They and the labels correctly figured out their competitors were illegal, and they sued. Should you not be able to sue someone doing something illegal just because they are in the same business as you?
s73v3r 11y ago
For one, there's no actual evidence that actually happened.

guelo 11y ago

They were crawling the web for mp3s the same way that Google does. Though admittedly Google hides the mp3s much better nowadays then they used to. And the web is way more balkanized into all these corporate walled gardens so there are fewer free roaming mp3s on random websites as there used to be. But technically it was a search engine the same as Google. It always bothers me that this area of the law seems to be entirely based on judges' interpretation of the purpose of a UI. A UI is illegal if it guides the user towards the illegal action. If it is possible to perform the illegal action but the user has to put in a little thought into how to accomplish it then the UI is legal. Google can't have a file-type search box with an mp3 option but if users know the right incantation they can achieve the same thing. So we have lawyers telling us how we can build UIs. It seems wrong and like a dangerous slippery slope.

mbrownnyc 11y ago
Interesting point! Worth noting that I do think that this is what lawyers _really_ do. They smudge the gray area to their will, and with enough effort, they make some sort of progress towards their client's bidding. Worth noting, even with the existence of Tomahawk and youtube... and napalm indexer, soulseek, and torrentz.eu, I still felt that it was much easier to pay for Spotify than to drill through the tendrils of the Internet. I had time when I was a poor college student/post-college "adult," but I figured semi-efficiently pirating music for 20 years (yes on a 56k modem as well), I'd rather just popcorntime it and go. Where is the popcorntime for music anyway? Does Tomahawk count at this?
notahacker 11y ago
I was under the impression that the UI was pretty incidental in most judges' interpretations that platforms used mainly to locate copyrighted material were on shakier ground than platforms which incidentally, and despite ostensibly significant efforts on the part of developers to limit it, could be used to locate copyright material. It's not like Google doesn't get hit by content-provider lawsuits either, it's just that they're big enough to usually get a settlement agreed on favourable terms and far too big to be bankrupted by legal costs, which is a wider and more general problem with litigation. Ironically I'm writing this listening to YouTube streaming in the background: a far superior free way to locate and listen to music without paying for it than most of the early pirate platforms ever could have hoped to be.

72deluxe 11y ago

" If I could compile and debug kernel issues along with X11 X86Config files with assistance from a good friend at the QNX-based Caprica Internet in LA and the 2-person Slackware “helpdesk” on the East Coast every few days then I’d be able to continue to test NCSA webserver over SLIP and PPP to deliver electronic faxes with a web interface for the Mosaic Browser for a sugar company in Marin County to save them a few thousand a month in fax fees to China. " How does one "debug" X11 config files? I had to do that when it hated my monitor and rubbish graphics card but that sentence appears like complete and utter rubbish. EDIT: For clarification for those disposed to downvote, looking through an XF86 config file is not rocket science.

IshKebab 11y ago
Maybe modern Xorg config files are not rocket science, but surely you remember the days of manually listing video modes, and trying endless combinations of video drivers. Hell I think you even needed to add special directives to get three button mice to work properly. Fortunately those days are gone, but you definitely could debug xf86 config files.
- JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  It wasn't so much debugging as it was laying our your video card and monitor manual, listing the config file and making sure all the little numbers match up.
  - nitrogen 11y ago
    The coolest thing one could do with a legacy XF86 config and a CRT monitor was invent new "overclocked" video modes. I had one monitor that was rated for 1280x1024 running at 1600x600 to match another monitor for a Xinerama setup.
  - IshKebab 11y ago
    ... and then debugging when it inevitably didn't work.
- 11y ago

JustSomeNobody 11y ago

"We had 50M monthly active users and 250M searches every month. Steve Jobs told the labels, including Warner Music, to sue us. So they did and for $40B. How do I know? I know because Steve Jobs gave them a list of music streaming sites that were competitive threats to iTunes, and told them to take care of it." Citation needed. Or did I miss it amongst the self-aggrandizing?

agentultra 11y ago
He named an engineer at Warner Music as his source.
- jasonlotito 11y ago
  The "engineer" being Howie Singer, the CTO of Warner Music.

skrowl 11y ago

Apple knows that they can't compete in the market, so they try to compete in the courtroom instead. It's the same reason they tried suing Samsung for such frivolous stuff as "icons with rounded rectangles" and "over-scroll rubber banding". That said, HN is pretty much an echo chamber of Apple fans, so you're unlikely to get many here to admit that they do anything wrong.

sosborn 11y ago
> Apple knows that they can't compete in the market Have you been paying attention at all the past 10+ years? Please explain they success they have had and how it came from their courtroom escapades.

milesskorpen 11y ago

". I also spent time through the years developing algorithms and predictive analytics associated to uncovering patterns in historical stock market data. " A bizarre comment — did he expect to see it coming? How does this relate to the story at hand? "Somehow, even someone as sophisticated as me, didn't see the downturn coming" ... if he could predict any kind of change in the stock industry better than investing professionals he wouldn't be running a questionably-legal streaming startup.

TheCowboy 11y ago
He's expressing that he didn't see it coming: Even with this knowledge base I failed to pay attention to what I knew was a deep systematic fissure in the financial markets signaled by the fall of Bear Stearns. I was focused on user acquisition, growth and resolving litigation as opposed to revenue, a mistake when the Black Swan appears. He's not claiming to have the ability to time markets perfectly. He had enough experience where he might have some awareness of the bigger economic and financial picture. He's saying that even people in the financial industry were caught off guard, especially investing professionals who are key to keeping startups funded. I found this context to be the most interesting part in addition to the role of how companies behaved in an oligopolistic way. It could also be taken as an argument for greater financial transparency, or recognizing that the stability of the financial sector is another risk to startups and innovation.
- nsgi 11y ago
  It doesn't seem to say whether he had any further success with that approach, other than predicting one event which may have been a coincidence.

lectrick 11y ago

So they intelligently crawled the web for music files to download which were... not purchased. The reason why they failed is because they, like many others, were "nebulously/quasi legal." (You know what was ALSO awesome yet not legal or respectful of creator pay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiogalaxy .) At least Apple was trying to make it all legit. They did start with DRM (note: no longer the case for years) but this was to make the record companies more comfortable with it. The reason why SeeqPod was sued is because Warner Music (and others) had a case. It was not a purely frivolous, harassing lawsuit.

phkahler 11y ago

Being a search engine for independents seems like a good idea. It's another area where eliminating anonymity can help. The problem for someone in that business is people putting stuff they don't own into the system and getting them sued. By making people more accountable that problem should go away. People on the web today are not really anonymous and not really identifiable either. I think we need to fix both of those problems.