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.
So did SeeqPod have some means by which the artists (cough, excuse me) the labels were getting paid? They said they were paying a lot for bandwidth, so they weren't just a search engine, but also a streaming service?
I built a third party app using their API, I always wondered the reasons for shutting down the site as it just went down one day with along with its API and a vague message on their homepage.
They had a web crawler indexing all publicly accessible songs or mp3 files which made up their search, the API let you query this database including a cached version of the song hosted on their servers. They weren't just a search engine, my app streamed the cached content as the direct URLs to the public files weren't always that reliable (slow, 404'd).
So they were like a "jukebox" for playing the copyrighted content, streaming it themselves, just like Google's YouTube does. The conceptual difference is that the users themselves upload the material to YouTube, whereas SeeqPod cached the content of other sites (like Google search does, albeit not with music and videos).
I'm not surprised that they were on the list of "problematic" companies of record companies. It's fascinating though to read that Sony wanted to actually be involved with SeeqPod in a bid to compete with others.
It seems that SeeqPod's doom was "just" that they didn't have such power to confront the record companies like Google did?
That is my intuition on this as well. YouTube is allowed to continually play 'wack-a-mole' with people putting up copyrighted material. I don't see why it would be any different with SeeqPod indexing it. Further, Google probably indexes tons of images which are infringing on someone's copyright and you can view these right in their search results.
With Bing, are they not streaming directly from the original provider? They are indeed embedding it in the search results pop-over, but I didn't think they were hosting any of that themselves.
Beyond that, it simply lacks credibility. I can't imagine that a Warner executive would be stupid enough to tell him that Steve Jobs was behind an unresolved lawsuit. It's even somewhat unbelievable that the executive would be allowed to speak to him, in the first place, without counsel being present.
The whole piece feels like it has some ulterior motive and he's taken the facts and added his own narrative rather than the truth. Perhaps he's trying to get a new venture funded and he believes a glorified retelling of his previous startup will help.
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).
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.
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
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.
