The New Freedom

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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. §106. 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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