Category: .

Google has reinstated Grooveshark’s app to the Android Market. My guess is that Google original took it down as part of a quid pro quo for YouTube or Play rights, and has now decided that this gives Grooveshark a good case to sue Google.

It comes back to Grooveshark’s tortious interference counterclaim against UMG.

ereads.com covers a guy who makes his living writing DMCA takedown requests:

Hank St. James is a piracy exterminator for hire. For a fee he monitors pirate sites and when he finds a client’s book on one he emails a takedown notice to the bad guys. “Sometimes this entails as many as nine emails to get one book taken down from one site,” he informs me. “They use some sites where they upload too and that site then re-ups to seven or eight other sites automatically.”

He claims a high success rate, about 98% getting links removed within 1-3 days. “I’ve cracked most of the larger ones,” he says.

Like anyone else in the law enforcement field, St. James’s job is fraught with danger. “I have been threatened by one clown in Holland connected with [an underground website] when we had a five day running battle to get one of my authors works removed from his site. I’ve picked up viruses from some sites which my software has caught. Fifteen of those viruses are in quarantine, however, as there apparently is no antidote for the strains that infected my computer. So, the virus software simply isolated the virus.”

Is Pirate Sinker cool and dispassionate? Hardly. “It is very frustrating, anger inducing work,” he says. “Recently, John Simpson had a new book come out and that same day it was on [another underground website] which kinda sent me into a blue rage. These shoplifting parasites have no shame.”

Observations:

His goal is not to sue, it’s to reduce infringement.

His approach isn’t automated. There’s a human actively making decisions, being persistent, putting emotion behind the work. This human-based approach can’t be cheap.

The cost to create an infringement is probably orders of magnitude less than what it costs to higher him. It’s a buck or two, or nothing, to upload the infringing content.

His job makes him about as popular as a repo man.

Shoemoney.com:

When news hit that Google would begin taking the number of DMCAs a website receives into its ranking algorithm, there was a definite split among SEOs about whether it was a smart move or not. On the one hand, it would negatively impact scraper sites or websites that have lifted content from one of their own sites. And on the other side, website owners who have unfairly received a DMCA could be negatively impacted.

So where does that leave SEOs? Well, with DMCAs a confirmed piece of the Goggle algo ranking puzzle, you can bet your AdSense check that one of the things some of the blacker SEOs will be doing is automatically filing multiple DMCAs against competitor sites. It won’t be very long before we see a huge uptick in the number of DMCAs filed in the industry.

SEO is so valuable that Google’s move could have a huge impact. It might actually have more teeth than the threat of a lawsuit.

Google URL Takedown Requests Up 100% In a Month, Up 1137% On 2011

The massive wave of DMCA takedowns sent by rightsholders to Google in recent months is growing at an astonishing rate. During the past month the number of takedown requests received by the search giant doubled to almost 1.5 million URLs per week. To put that into perspective, exactly one year ago weekly URL takedowns numbered just 131,577 per week, an increase of 1,137%.

While many sites comply with DMCA-style takedown requests in order to maintain their ‘safe harbor’ status, sites such as The Pirate Bay routinely refuse to take anything down.

For a long time there was little that could be done to stop casual users from subsequently finding content on sites like TPB by using regular search engines such as Google. However, during the last couple of years a growing movement has sought to do just that, not just against sites like TPB, but against all domains, no matter what their copyright policies.

In the week starting July 23, rightsholders asked for 1,107,659 URLs to be taken down, an increase of more than 50% on the previous weekly record. But amazingly even this record was about to be smashed.

The American DMCA defined the global rulebook for safe harbor. Europe, Canada, and Oceania have rough parity with the DMCA.

Except that in the US, you have to register an agent with the government. Outside the US a site just needs to post contact info on its web site. Inside the US a site needs to print out a form, fill it in, send it by mail with a check, and then repeat the entire procedure every time the contact info changes or the same company add a site. The check is about $100.

That’s a lot of friction! No surprise that few American sites bother to comply.

It seems like a fine point, but there is a big impact. Far fewer American sites are in safe harbor. Sites outside the US are far more likely to be within the law.

The boolean logic of safe harbor is one giant AND statement. (AIUI/IANAL). If every little detail is correct, you are in. If not, you are out. There’s no semi-in for sites that do everything right except register an agent.

So if you’re a copyright troll the lesson is clear: sue American.

Two related bits of Apple TV news –

On July 26, the new version of OS X was announced with a smallish new feature:

When iOS 4.2 debuted, Apple changed the name of AirTunes—the feature that let you stream music from iTunes to an AirPort Express—to AirPlay, and in the process upgraded it considerably. In addition to streaming audio from iTunes on your computer, you could now stream from any AirPlay-enabled iOS app—you could even stream video to Apple TV. In fact, as of iOS 5, you could actually mirror the screen of an iPhone 4S or later, or an iPad 2 or later—whatever that screen displayed, you could view on your TV through your Apple TV. AirPlay mirroring was such a great feature that people wanted it for their Macs. And in Mountain Lion, Apple has delivered: You can now send your Mac’s screen to any second- or third-generation Apple TV on the same local network and mirror it on any connected TV.

So the ability to throw content from your device to your TV used to be limited to iOS devices, and now you can do it on PC-class devices.

It happens that a lot of video on the web comes with more generous licensing terms than when it is accessed via a smartphone or tablet. The ability to throw content from PC to TV makes this somewhat moot.

Hulu is free on PC, but charges a monthly fee on connected TVs. In reducing the barrier between PC and TV, it became harder for Hulu to exert enough pressure on customers to pay the fee.

The second bit of news came today: Hulu became available on Apple TV, with payment made through iTunes.

Hulu Plus subscribers can finally start using the service on Apple’s Web TV peripheral, via a software update Apple pushed out overnight. So if you’re paying the service’s $8-a-month fee, you can now stream TV shows, movies — along with ads — directly to your flat screen.
This bring’s Apple’s hardware to parity with other devices like the Roku devices and Microsoft’s Xbox 360

The important thing is between the lines: Hulu Plus is now tithing part of the subscription fees to Apple.

Like Apple’s deal with Netflix, Hulu Plus is integrated directly into Apple’s iTunes store, which means that if you aren’t a Hulu Plus subscriber, you can sign up using your iTunes account, and Hulu will bill you via Apple. Presumably this means that just like it does with Netflix, Apple will keep a portion of Hulu’s monthly fee.

Paying Apple in perpetuity is a bummer for Hulu. But they had to do it, because PC mirroring put them in a lose-lose situation. Either all usage of Hulu on Apple TV would be unpaid, because it was mirrored from the PC, or it would be paid via the iTunes store and Apple would get a cut:

Hulu and its owner/content partners (Disney, Comcast, and News Corp. , which also owns this Web site) had little choice but to get Hulu Plus onto Apple TV. Because with the new Airplay feature in Apple’s new Mountain Lion update, anyone with an Apple TV can already “mirror” the free Hulu Web service onto their TVs. Not being able to offer the paid service – which offers features like a deeper content library and HD streaming — would have been quite vexing for Jason Kilar and company.

That’s a smart bit of hardball strategy on Apple’s part. I don’t _like_ it, but I admire it.

Jay Frank:

I’ve heard numerous complaints from women that they dislike music thru subscription services because it’s too much work to hear their favorites over and over. … The overwhelming variety of musical choices is desired more by males than females. On average, women have 25% less music in their collection than males. At the same time, they remember 28% more lyrics by heart than men. Internet radio is generally proud of the fact that they have more variety and don’t repeat songs every hour. The numbers seem to show that this may be a liability to a strong segment of listeners.

My wife uses a mix of push with pull. She’ll search for a specific artist or song, then play radio based on that. She splits her searches about 50/50 between artists and tracks, and never looks for specific albums.

Radio needs the internet to surface the hits. The internet needs radio to establish hits that bring traffic. Maybe it turns out that what we needed all along wasn’t a war between two mediums, but a solid peace treaty

Leaked Report Reveals Music Industry’s Global Anti-Piracy Strategy:

IFPI is clear on their requirements for cyberlockers to operate to their liking. Their number one desire is that they “proactively filter for infringing content” but if they don’t they must “operate an effective and efficient notice and take down system.” Failure to implement either means sites will be required to “shut down”.

Effective means to implement the spirit of the law via details like terminating the accounts of repeat infringers. Efficient means that submitting notices shouldn’t be a burdonsome process.

The Go language at Soundcloud:

Go has been described by several engineers here as a WYSIWYG language. That is, the code does exactly what it says on the page. It’s difficult to overemphasize how helpful this property is toward the unambiguous understanding and maintenance of software. Go explicitly rejects “helper” idioms and features like the Uniform Access Principle, operator overloading, default parameters, and even exceptions, on the basis that they create more problems through ambiguity than they solve in expressivity. There’s no question that these decisions carry a cost of keystrokes—especially, as most new engineers on Go projects lament, during error handling—but the payoff is that those same new engineers can easily and immediately build a complete mental model of the application. I feel confident in saying that time from zero to productive commits is faster in Go than any other language we use; sometimes, dramatically so.

The business of music is not music. It is using music to sell other types of products, such as jeans and cars. That’s why the new Echo Nest APIs for non-music apps are brilliant.

With the Taste Profile Similarity feature, services can “group like-minded users together by finding the most similar Taste Profiles to any single seed Taste Profile for many interesting reasons.” Additionally, the “affinity prediction” system “uses music preferences as predictive of other media preferences and psychographic attributes.” For instance, Echo Nest experimented with affinity prediction and “demonstrated the correlation between music and political affiliation.”