Thursday, February 14th, 2008...4:57 pm
RIAA sends DMCA takenown notice to developer of the Jukebox Facebook application
My friend and housemate Paul Sawaya is the author one of the better Facebook applications, Jukebox, which lets users add an MP3 player to their profiles with a nice user interface (and thankfully no autoplay). It’s a nice, quick way to recommend and play music for your friends, and it has ~30,000 users.
Yesterday, Paul received a DMCA nastygram from Mark McDevitt, Vice President of Piracy at the RIAA. They found thousands of infringing tracks and, not surprisingly, they aren’t very happy about it and want it to go away. If Paul were simply hosting and redistributing their songs, then they would be right.
However, he isn’t doing anything of the sort. Paul’s application merely points your browser to an offsite file which was provided by the application user. Most of the files listed on the nastygram (and there are literally thousands, they must have developed a script for checking out these types of things) are hosted on Google pages and other personal websites. The RIAA doesn’t have the resources to make cases against these thousands of individuals or to make a case against against the mighty Google, so they are intimidating a college student instead.
Unfortunately, unless I am mistaken, and I will be investigating this further (if you are legally-minded, please get in touch!), Linking is not a crime! It is the basis of the entire internet. If you don’t want people deeplinking your content, get a .htaccess file, not a lawyer.
This hearkens back to the TV-Links.co.uk arrests in the UK this October. That was the UK, however. This is ‘meeerrica, fuck yeah! Here, the issue is still up in the air. We have the freedom to link, but Grokster was ruled as illegal by the Supreme Court. This seems to fall somewhere in between, as his service does let people ’share files’, but it doesn’t provide the actual protocol by which to do so.
Under 17 U.S.C. ยง106. of the DMCA, it is copyright infringement to perform or display a work in public without permission from the copyright owner. Is Paul doing this? Or are the people hosting the content doing this? Or perhaps, are the users of the application? Is Facebook responsible as well? Facebook has been notified too, I wonder who they will side with, their developers or the RIAA. If they don’t side with Paul, perhaps I can drum up some backlash from the development community.
I don’t know how this will play out, but I’m looking out for my friend. If you can help us or would like to know more, please contact either of us as soon as possible.
Rich
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3 Comments
February 14th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Good luck, I wish more people would fight these requests blantly mislead requests. These companies are slowly making the DMCA useless by showing how much abusive power it has.
February 14th, 2008 at 8:07 pm
If there is no file true file sharing, then I can’t see the problem with this. I assume the RIAA is just being pissy as usual, but if anything were to happen this could be a big case that the RIAA would have a hard time fighting.
The only possible way one could get those files is to search ravenously through one’s own Content.ie5, and I seriously doubt that arguement would hold up in court if prepared for.
If the program truely only plays music and uploads from the user’s computer only, there are many programs that do this. If they are trying to say the links are attempts to illegally acquire the songs from google, tell them it’s nonsense since yahoo is much better for such things. I kid, that would be a bad idea, but you get my point.
March 1st, 2009 at 2:08 pm
is there a forum on the site?
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