There are two major components to DMCA safe-harbor compliance. The first is that you honor takedown requests; unfortunately for software entrepreneurs, this seems to be the only DMCA component that is widely understood.
The second major component is that you not operate your service with direct knowledge of infringement. A simple way to illustrate this is that if you have a screenshot of your application being used to play Madonna tracks, you are obligated to hunt down those tracks and remove them yourself. If it can be shown that you purposefully don't do that, you can end up forfeiting safe-harbor.
You are probably happier in the long run for shutting this project down. While you clearly want to believe that you aren't infringing copyright, which is an admirable sentiment, you obviously aren't taking advantage of "fair use" by giving your users direct access to copyrighted music under your own branding.
There are a few other formalities that can trip you up, like having a registered DMCA contact. If you're going into a business like this, you probably want to get a lawyer to explain it all to you. There are just too many gotchas out there and you'll be a magnet for legal threats.
EDIT: Also, it's "safe harbor" not "fair use"--the article gets it wrong. One more reason to have a lawyer explain your obligations to you before you get into something like this.
Fwiw, it's also possible for any third party to check if you've complied with that particular formality, since the U.S. Copyright Office provides a directory of all companies that have registered a DMCA agent: http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/a_agents.html
The interesting thing is that what happens without the safe harbor is not a known quantity. The safe harbor is like immunity, but lack of immunity isn't the same as liability. But in order to find out, somebody has to take it to court, and the entities small enough to have not registered a DMCA agent will tend to settle or be bankrupted by the litigation costs before the issue makes it to an appellate court.
Yeah, it's not something we're likely to see put to the test, as if you can afford the legal bills to fight a copyright action in federal court, you surely can afford the small filing fee to register a DMCA contact in the first place in order to fend off the likelihood of much larger fees later.
> What I did was simply store links to music files hosted elsewhere on the internet and acted as a conduit for these music files, allowing people to search songs by title/artist and play/create playlists using my interface.
That's exactly why a lot music are not playable on the old turntable.fm. They are blocked even though they are searchable (which talks to various APIs as well?)
For someone who co-ran a popular BBS forum in the past with millions of Chinese users, I and my other admins got a lot of notices and threats to arrest us. I was also in my high school year as well. Just a few years ago. We didn't shut down the site, it still exists and is still pretty popular. We changed our domain name because it was somehow conflicting with another television company's name and we took down certain torrent files at their requests. We still allow people to upload these illegal contents but we just play nice. I guess we weren't the top players like PirateBay so we haven't been told that we must shut down. We just receive notices. But do play nice.
> I spent a lot of time building HypedMusic. I’ve learned a lot of really cool stuff along the way
You should talk to them. You should inform your users about this and think about future plans. Maybe instead of allowing them to search for illegal contents you can play a demo and link to iTune, soundcloud for purchase? If you have a lot of users you should look for partnership. With users, you should come up with new model. It will be tough, but think about it for a moment. Otherwise you have learned a lot by developing an app yourself. That's a plus already.
What if I've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort of pop-knowledge into itself? If I see a screenshot of an apparently home-made video am I supposed to think "small band that probably intentionally released this video to get more attention = OK" or "probably a filter added by a popular band that doesn't need more attention = Remove"?
This is ignoring jurisdiction, too. IIRC, AllOfMp3 operated for a while since in Russia they could buy a blanket copyright licensed and successfully used that to legally make sales until Visa illegally turned off payment and finally the Russian government got them to acquiesce. Yet the site was legal, despite everyone else accusing it of infringement.
Edit: Also, yes, perhaps the law is saying "well if you really knew" and leaving it to the courts. But there's also cases of where Viacom uploaded content, then sued over it, not knowing they themselves had uploaded (and hence licensed it) to YouTube.
What if I've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort of pop-knowledge into itself?
No, but the fact that the site owner is using these screenshots to advertise his service obligates him to do due diligence on the copyright status of those tracks. Coincidentally picking one of the most popular artists of the last quarter-century to promote your site rings a little hollow.
Your jurisdictional argument also doesn't hold water. First of all, the site owner was operating in the USA, so he's bound by US law. Second, buying a "blanket copyright" in Russia doesn't confer rights to sell content in other countries.
If someone buys content from russia they are dealing with russian entitiy not with US one. Given that he can probably shore up some sort of company and do business through that via appointed trustee.
What if I've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort of pop-knowledge into itself?
A reasonable* person would have heard of Madonna and would respond to such evidence of infringement in a timely fashion.
* The definition of 'a reasonable person' is a vexed one. While it's popularly understood to mean something like 'a regular Joe/Jill,' and that's good enough for many purposes, it might be more helpful to think of it as 'someone whose behavior could be reasoned ahead of time by a third party.' So if you're running a site dedicated to music, and given that Madonna is one of the most famous music performers in the world, it's logical (reasonable) to assume you would know who she is. OTOH if you were running some antiquarian maps hosting site and someone uploaded a Madonna video there, you might be excused for not appreciating the significance of same in any action for damages.
> The second major component is that you not operate your service with direct knowledge of infringement.
By advertising he is kind of making your argument invalid. "This is the kind of music you can get" should involve some level of analysis to ensure you aren't accidentally listing copyrighted content if you truly want to live under the safe harbor laws.
For instance Youtube makes a best effort in all of its advertising to only show content that is legitimate. If some gets through that is fine, but you should at least spend a bit of time making sure you aren't accidently listing a well known band.
I doubt it's illegal to embed a track that's been uploaded by the copyright owner, as they can just disable embedding. I'm assuming it becomes illegal if the uploader didn't own the copyright and was uploading the track illegally. This is impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice, YouTube does all it can, if they can't catch this then how can a normal user do so.
I haven't seen the case law, but from the following commentary, I'd say the issue isn't so clear-cut:
> However, if the service provider becomes aware of a "red flag" from which infringing activity is apparent, it will lose
the limitation of liability if it takes no action. The "red flag" test
has both a subjective and an objective element. In determining
whether the service provider was aware of a "red flag," the subjective
awareness of the service provider of the facts or circumstances
in question must be determined. However, in deciding whether
those facts or circumstances constitute a "red flag"—in other words,
whether infringing activity would have been apparent to a reasonable
person operating under the same or similar circumstances—
an objective standard should be used.
So, the defense that infringement is "impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice" probably doesn't apply. If the site owner reasonably should have known of the infringement, safe harbor protection is forfeited.
The moral is that you need to be proactive about removing infringing content. Yes, it's true that YouTube doesn't take down every offending video. But they (at least claim to) actively monitor for infringement to the best of their abilities:
Disclaimer: Don't take my advice here as a comprehensive guide to DMCA compliance. My comments are a far cry from that.
Edit: I should add that I'm not offering an opinion as to whether the OP's site violated the DMCA, or whether the RIAA's takedown was valid. My comments were meant to apply generally, not to the OP's specific case.
You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity. It wasn't apparent to them that copyright was being breached so the "red flag" is not apparent to a reasonable entity, i.e. if the embeder is liable so is YouTube. This makes sense but I don't if it would be convincing elsewhere.
> You could argue that, YouTube has maintained their safe harbour, and hence they're a reasonable entity.
That's not how the reasonable person standard works. "Reasonable person" is a term of art. A reasonable person is a sort of thought experiment that's used often in law. We imagine a hypothetical person who is in most respects like the average person, and who makes sound judgments based on the information available to him or her. We then hold real legal entities, such as website proprietors in DMCA cases, to the standard of this hypothetical reasonable person. For example, we say that a reasonable person running such and such website would have noticed copyright infringement, and thus the website's proprietor was obligated to remediate the infringement.
The fact that YouTube has maintained its safe harbor means YouTube is successful in that regard. It doesn't tell us anything about the legal definition of a "reasonable person."
I'm not asking "is it mathematically possible?" I'm asking "do you really think Madonna, or Madonna's agent, uploaded that video?"
The court system very rarely works on the concept of "well, it could have been legit." If you buy a bunch of speakers 90% off out of the back of a van in an alley with their serial numbers scratched off, "well, it could have been legit" will not fly very far.
I'm not asking "is it mathematically possible?" I'm asking "do you really think Madonna, or Madonna's agent, uploaded that video?""
Isn't that what record companies do these days? I thought that was the idea behind the Vevo stuff. Between that and Youtube's audio fingerprinting, it seems reasonable to assume that if a pop star's song is on youtube, it is because their record company put it there.
I was thinking the same thing. The website appears to be making it very easy to aid and abet (not in the strict legal sense) piracy. It's very shaky ground.
Since I'm lucky enough to be on the front page of HN (thanks a lot!) I'd just like to shamelessly self promote and say
1) I'm looking for an internship this summer at a startup- please let me know if any of you have open positions! Please email me at lukezli[at]yahoo.com.
2) Check out my new project, catchyurl.co, a url shortener that creates memorable shortened urls like catchyurl.co/EskimoHill
Let me know if you have any questions for me- hope the blog doesn't crash!
I think you learned a valuable lesson here, you should not try to create apps that work with the music industry if you don't have some sort of licensing agreement with them.
It doesn't really matter if it is strictly legal (under DMCA and other relevant legislation) or not, they can and will use lawyers to intimidate and/or sue you. It doesn't matter if you're linking to third party hosting or what the technicalities are, if your app can play back music or video that is "owned" by the big players (RIAA/MPAA/MAFIAA) you are under threat.
You made the right choice (thinking practically, not necessarily morally) in not trying your luck in court, you have very little chances of winning and could possibly ruin your future by having a nasty lawsuit on your records.
I don't think it is fair or approve of it but that's the way it works, unfortunately. Google and YouTube can get away with it, not because of DMCA and other laws but because they have (secret?) treaties with the copyright holding parties.
What you're basically saying, and I sadly have to agree:
Don't make an app that works with the music industry.
There was no need for any more words. Where would the music industry be today without any of the apps that currently have a licensing agreement? No music in Youtube videos. No Pandoras or Spotify or iTunes even. What would that internet even look like?
I just find it really odd that an entire industry seems to live to bite the hands that feed it. I may be entirely wrong in my assessment, so I'll take whatever licks may come.
As a developer first and a hopeful musician second, one who deeply wishes those roles were reversed, I have to always stop myself when I think of a clever idea revolving around music. It has to have such a rigid constraint that it is almost worthless to continue any endeavor.
Just a suggestion: I would choose a shorter domain name for the service if the purpose is to create shortened urls. Every character is precious on Twitter et al.
IANAL. First of all a cease and desist doesn't require you to do anything. It's merely a threat. That said it seems pretty clear that you're violating copyright laws. The DMCA only applies to user generated content (UGC). You're not letting users input their own links to 3rd party content, you're finding the links yourself. It doesn't matter where you get them from. Not only that but you're not linking to this content on other sites, you're actively playing it for users within your app.
It's very cool you built this in HS. Let the whole thing be a good lesson in building apps and dealing with the law.
It's not at all clear that he's violating any laws. There is no infringement in providing access in a good-faith belief that the content is legit. And it's a fair assumption that the people actually publishing the music files on their websites wouldn't be doing so without authorization from the rights holders. Further, downloading in general (as opposed to publishing) is expressly legal in some countries (e.g., reportedly Germany).
RIAA's best argument would be "contributory infringement", but findings of CI have succeeded only when the actors had some reason to think the files in question were published without authorization. Further, the RIAA offers no evidence for its claim that many of the files were unauthorized, and its implication that you have some way of knowing their licensing status is pure fantasy or lies.
So, I disagree with the "give up, it's illegal" assessment.
The real problem here is that success in civil litigation is directly related to wealth, such that we have a two-tier court system which is a travesty of justice for the have-nots and an unregulated weapon for the "haves". So yes, you have to capitulate, but not for the reason the above poster suggests.
There's no such thing as "legit content". Licensing is not a characteristic of the content, it's a relationship between the content and the person distributing it.
So give a crude example, the content on Netflix is "legit", in the sense that they have the right to distribute it, but that doesn't make it legal for you to record and retransmit the same content.
If you don't know if you can distribute it, you should assume you can't, because that's the default position in the law. You need to have some kind of license to override it.
He doesn't distribute it though, only links to it. I am pretty sure I am allowed to link to netflix even though I don't have distribution rights for the content hosted there.
Beemp3 provides just links. HyperMusic (from the screenshots) actually played them on the app itself. Maybe it downloaded them locally, but that's an irrelevant technical detail.
> If you don't know if you can distribute it, you should assume you can't
That's 100% wrong. The default state of a work of art is to be in the public domain. Copyright law creates only a limited exception to that general rule.
That's incorrect in any country (167 of them, including most of the west) that signed the Berne Convention (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_convention), which makes all works copyright-by-default.
That's actually incorrect in the US. The default state of a work of art is that it is copyrighted with ownership granted to the creator, with all rights reserved.
These rights have to be waived for it to become public domain.
The Creative Commons level zero license is probably the best option. In some jurisdictions it is impossible to give up something into the public domain, so the CC0 explicitly gives up as many rights as possible. If it is possible to put something into the public domain, then it does.
Morally speaking you might be right, and on geological timescales, sure. But every work is under copyright the moment it is created until copyright expires unless the creator specifically gives it to the PD.
In the modern world, unfortunately, if there's no accompanying license with the material it's pretty likely that you don't have the legal right to distribute it.
Not really. Works are automatically copyrighted upon creation. It's not some limited exception. You cannot assume a work is public domain until proven otherwise. Otherwise you'll be getting a nastygram from the RIAA.
He has to capitulate because he's 18, ignorant of the relevant laws, and likely has no money to be thrown away on litigation. He definitely has shallower pockets than the RIAA. In the civil arena in the U.S., that's an automatic loss.
Since operating in good faith is apparently untenable, there is no particular reason for anyone to operate in good faith with respect to the RIAA. Thus copyright piracy proliferates.
I'm sure that there are plenty of software writers that would be happy to help the RIAA connect their members with potential new fans and paying customers over the Internet. It's a crying shame that the RIAA consistently turns them away by acting like total dicks.
While I also disagree that it's illegal, I do concur with the decision to fold. If you don't have a big gun behind you to back you up, like the EFF or ACLU, you lose against the RIAA. Even if you "win" in court by the judges' decisions, you already lost time, money, and reputation by the time you get there, with no way of ever getting that back.
> Since operating in good faith is apparently untenable, there is no particular reason for anyone to operate in good faith with respect to the RIAA. Thus copyright piracy proliferates.
Let's be real here. You're not operating in good faith when you link to a bunch of major-label content free on the internet. It's implausible that you actually believe that content to be legitimate. Rather, you're looking to profit from a loophole.
He's young enough and clearly sharp enough to get some promotion out of his ordeal (front page HN isn't too bad) and will move on to certainly bigger and better things. No reason to start out your dev career in the hole a few hundred grand to lawyers and the RIAA and get nothing out of it.
Like Kenny used to say, "You gotta know when to hold them and know when to fold them."
He should have made decent revenue with banner ads or interstitials at this point with that large user base. Getting a lawyer to at least look into it would have been an option.
The clear purpose and/or design of this application is to encourage, _facilitate_, and/or cause its users to stream and/or download popular sound recordings, the vast majority of which are owned or controlled by RIAA Member companies and are not authorized for distribution in this manner, while at the same time providing you/your company with _certain financial or related benefits_.
This is how a lot of Dutch sharing websites were closed: Facilitating copyright infringement with monetary gain. They got TV links (a site very similar to OP's site, only crawling for and posting links and embeds) for trademark infringement. Later on some Dutch ISP's were forced to block The Pirate Bay, because by allowing access to the site they facilitated copyright infringement(or so the court ruled). A Dutch blog was charged with republishing copyrighted material by placing a link. This later was overturned and became a fine for "facilitating".
Placing some links as facilitating copyright infringement sets a dangerous precedent for net neutrality.
"There is no infringement in providing access in a good-faith belief that the content is legit."
I don't believe that is true. Content distribution is a complicated affair. Redistribution of content is not as easy as saying "well if site xyz has the right to distribute it, so do I"
So what is "becomes aware of a link"? How is that different than the copyright holder sending a notice? Because without the copyright holder (and even courts) it's not very clear.
I am not a lawyer. I believe Google is exempt because it indexes all links it can find. It needs this to operate a general purpose search engine. As soon as Google became a specialized torrent search engine they could be similarly liable. Also Google has to comply with legit DMCA requests or they still risk being liable.
I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything. He is just pointing to other sources doing the actual distribution (which may be legal). He is just providing links, although with a nice interface.
> I wonder how can he be violating any law with respect to distribution of copyrighted content when he is not distributing anything
Anton Vickerman didn't host anything either. His site (surfthechannel) was also just a collection of links.
And, sure enough, he was held not to have committed any copyright-related offence.
So they got him on conspiracy to defraud [the record companies] instead. He's now serving a four year prison term after a private prosecution by FACT, a copyright industry trade organisation - an extraordinary move, initiated after the CPS (state prosecutors) refused to prosecute him. (Note: this is in the UK, not the US).
His app actually played the media though and not for personal use. The copyright holders have exclusive rights to determine how their content gets played/broadcast.
But to respond to OP, IANAL but I think that you might have folded too easily. But it's understandable that you probably want to avoid a lawsuit at any cost.
How can you know what a DMCA Takedown is and not understand how Google can operate?
The DMCA gives you a "safe harbor" from accidental copyright infringement. But once you know it's copyrighted you have to take it down. AKA, the DMCA notice.
The DMCA won't protect you from knowingly linked to copyrighted material and waiting until someone sends a letter. That's how Megaupload is getting pwnd.
Maybe I know how it works. Maybe I said that to highlight exactly what you are talking about and to underscore the fact that he did not have to shutdown his service if he was compliant with DMCA takedowns, just like Google.
His app store page had a screenshot of his app playing a Madonna song...
"Finally, the service provider must not have knowledge that the material or activity is infringing or of the fact that the infringing material exists on its network. [512(c)(1)(A)], [512(d)(1)(A)]. If it does discover such material before being contacted by the copyright owners, it is instructed to remove, or disable access to, the material itself. [512(c)(1)(A)(iii)], [512(d)(1)(C)]. "
There should be Anon Legal spamming these services with tons of links to real sites supported by RIAA as to make searching for any legal music useless through google. Because google complies with RIAA, an effort should be made to make for google to have it be too expensive to verify said claims and/or RIAA suffer from same tactics they employ.
I'm aware of that. That still implies that at some point Google linked to illegal material yet when requested, they removed it. Presumably HypedMusic could have had a similar deal.
Yes, a provider can follow the DMCA safe harbor procedures to facilitate the filing of DMCA takedown notices, and comply with those promptly. The details are outlined here: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/faq.cgi
Basically, a provider needs to provide contact information for a designated agent for DMCA takedown notices. Had Luke done so, and complied with legal DMCA takedown requests (as well as counter-notifications), he could have continued operating his service; however, that may have become considerably more work than he wanted to put into running the service.
The brilliant fact of magnet links is even when TPB goes down, you can ask Google for a cache of a TPB page. The cache of the page still has functional magnet links.
> I was under the impression that what I was doing was legal, protected under DMCA’s fair use policy, which by practice is what makes sites like Youtube legal: although they host millions of illegal content uploaded by users, as long as they agree to take down said videos when requested by copyright owners, they are in the clear because it is difficult/impossible to monitor what gets uploaded to their sites.
Actually, YouTube doesn't just passively sit around waiting for copyright holders to whack each mole one at a time; it has an incredibly sophisticated and powerful content-matching engine that does monitor what's being uploaded, and automatically checks new videos against a giant corpus of known copyrighted works.
> it has an incredibly sophisticated and powerful content-matching engine that does monitor what's being uploaded, and automatically checks new videos against a giant corpus of known copyrighted works
This is above and beyond the requirements of the DMCA though. Doing this isn't what makes Youtube legal, it just attempts to appease copyright holders.
That's a dangerous oversimplification. Read about the billion-dollar Viacom / YouTube lawsuit, and how it was anything but a sure thing that YouTube would win, despite their DMCA protections.
I believe there was a copyright safe harbor for content on the internet before DMCA. However, it may have been just through case law. BBS and USENet operators took advantage of it back in the day.
Not just attempts to appease. It also provides youtube with advertising options on popular content because some copyright owners would like to leave material up and take a cut of ad revenue.
I had a bit similar experience. When I was 16 (so around 2008), I had a poker blog, just translating stuff from wikipedia and posting some random 'news'. It was in Lithuania (EU). A small blog, with about 300 daily visitors. A few months later, I got a letter from the government telling me that I was infringing some ambiguously worded gambling law. And they were requesting an official explanation what was I doing (I guess they just reworded testimony).
The idea was that you can blog about poker only if you are a licensed gambling company, and I was facing a fine of $2500-7000 (the blog had $0.00 income, and for the contrast, my parents were earning $1000/mo combined). It felt extremely unfair.
It scared the shit out of me. I had to go to the police station, didn't contact any lawyer, and wrote my 'explanation' telling that I was not making any money and did publish publicly available information and I am sorry.
After a month of sleepless nights, I got a letter saying that they decided not to take any further action and that's a warning. Well, it fucking warned me big time.
> The website/apps I’m talking about was called HypedMusic, which provided an interface to listen to free, unlimited music, create playlists, and share said playlists with your friends on the website or Android and iPhone apps.
Rephrased to be more accurate:
"I built a website where 99.9% of the value provided came from someone else's investment and work which I used without compensating them."
If they can't have a lawyer, send via certified mail (yes, snail mail) specifying the actual complaint, and the legal justification behind said complain, then just ignore them.
I am not a fan of aggressive, litigious companies. And the morality of physical vs intellectual property is a whole another issue that warrants more discussion.
However, all that baggage aside, you kinda did create this website so people can share copyright infringing files. Did you really expect people to only share personal, non-copyrighted music? Come on.
Anyways. You should be proud of the work you've done though. It's not easy to follow through with an idea.
An important note here, is that if you don't have a lawyer, people can threaten to sue you for anything. In this case, he had no lawyer, he had no legal counsel at all.
Granted, part of his legal counsel would be to determine whether or not what he was doing was legal or not. Obviously, he didn't want to test that out in front of a judge (who could blame him?), or against the RIAA's well paid lawyers.
But if you are going to build a business, even on what you believe is on firm legal grounds... you should have a legal team ready to back you up. Anyone can threaten you with anything in the US due to how tort law works. Only if you are willing to have your cases tested in actual courts will you have any protection at all.
Not if you know you are collecting a bunch of copyrighted material. Piratebay can't use the safe harbor because they are clearly running a sharing site.
Also, the author suggests he was getting the links manually and posting them. That's definitely not covered.
Hey, just wanted to clarify- I was not manually getting links and posting them. When someone posted a search query on my website, I would use 3rd party APIs and run the same search query on those APIs, then return results from those APIs to the users. All done programmatically.
The music industry as we know it is dead. As someone with a history in the industry, it is time to discover and embrace the new music model...whatever that may be. And there are many things it might be. Streaming, yes. The end of downloads? I don't think so but maybe. The ability for deserving artists without the backing of the major-label machine to have a measurable amount of success. Stay tuned ;)
First of all I'm sorry to hear that you have to shut down your app, but I'm confident that things are going to work out just fine for you.
I actually had a very similar experience when I was 18 as well. I decided to make a book search engine that would aggregate reviews from different sources across the web and provide a high quality, clean interface to quickly see information about a book and links to buy it on Amazon. The problem my service solved is that the Amazon interface is extremely ugly, and while I'm sure it is fine tuned for maximum sales it is definitely highly lacking in aesthetics and is cluttered with a lot of garbage. My goal was to create the cleanest, most minimal but extremely useful book search engine.
In retrospect my service was breaking many TOS because of the way it worked. When someone entered a book title or author name it would utilize Amazon API's to get information about relevant books that matched the query, then it would scrape book information from Amazon, Goodreads, Barnes and Nobles, and the New York Times sunday book review among other sources, then it would cache that scraped information in my own database for future reference.
I justified this to myself by thinking it was okay because I was remixing the information to generate my own summary pages that were cleaner and more useful, but the reality is that I was pretty much parasitizing these other services to build my own database.
At its peak my service had many GB's of scraped data from other sites and was getting about 5000 searches a day which was netting me about $500-$700 a month from commission on Amazon referrals sales. But after I started getting some press coverage in The Next Web, etc all the services that I was utilizing started sending me cease and desist notices. People used my site because it was cleaner and nicer than Amazon but Amazon didn't appreciate that I was scraping their content to build my own site so they cut off my API access and closed my Amazon Associate account.
In the end it was a wild six month ride in which I made a few thousand dollars but more importantly got tons of experience in coding a scalable site, and best of all I started getting a lot of job offers. At one point I was getting three or four job offers a month from different startups from the HN community.
Eventually I decided to settle down at one of them where I could continue developing my coding skills. Things turned out very well, and the ride of personal growth and discovery isn't over for me yet. Every day I get to code interesting things for my current startup company and this time its a legitimate business that isn't going to get shut down for stealing content.
Even though you probably feel very disappointed about having to shut down your service like I did when I had to shut down mine, you can be confident that with your skills things will turn out just fine for you, and a lot of interesting startup companies will probably be eager to employ you.
So glad you posted this, I was doing something similar and gave up on the idea because I noticed Amazon doesn't even want you keeping their ASINs in a database. But I kept thinking maybe I'm just being paranoid and they wouldn't care.
Glad you made some money off the dev time you put in!
Job is a job, business is a business. I hand it to you that you did this the way you did, perhaps you could've found a way to stay under the radar, grow the business and maybe find an investor that could stock most popular offerings and let you sell them yourself - ie putting your matches first. Gradually cutting amazon and others out of the loop. That is why they sent you sent cease and decease letters, becaue they do not care for people to be becoming their competitiors.
Mehh the grey areas of the DCMA grind my gears. Aggregation services do not host and (for the most part) they do not upload the content.
Your situation is unfortunate kiddo. If you had a couple million or a high powered law firm on retainer, I doubt you'd have ever received this letter. But keep up the good work!
Did you not consider hiring a lawyer? I know they cost money, but this sounds like it was a major investment of time for you. If you want it to ever be a successful business, you'd eventually have to put money into it. How did you pay for hosting?
There's a big difference between a 15 year old coming up with $3/month for hosting, and coming up with $300/hour to be told you misunderstood the DMCA and aren't protected.
They probably had a lawyer advice them on which threats were substantial, and which ones weren't.
The RIAA is famous for sending out threats on anyone or anything that remotely does anything they disagree with. They don't necessarily even have a legal argument to win the case. But they have their lawyers write up nasty letters and emails to coerce you into doing what they want.
Without a lawyer of your own, who can sift through these C&D letters... you're pretty much defenseless.
--------------
More realistically... the Youtube / Tumbler approach was most likely "Ignore the Letters, and hope for the best". These kinds of letters aren't necessarily threatening legal action.
The second major component is that you not operate your service with direct knowledge of infringement. A simple way to illustrate this is that if you have a screenshot of your application being used to play Madonna tracks, you are obligated to hunt down those tracks and remove them yourself. If it can be shown that you purposefully don't do that, you can end up forfeiting safe-harbor.
You are probably happier in the long run for shutting this project down. While you clearly want to believe that you aren't infringing copyright, which is an admirable sentiment, you obviously aren't taking advantage of "fair use" by giving your users direct access to copyrighted music under your own branding.