It’s no secret that the record industry hates Seeqpod, a music site that lets users stream songs for free. Last year the company was sued by Warner Music Group (the outcome of the suit is still pending). Now, the company has just been slapped with a complaint from EMI. But the new complaint goes one step further, personally naming some of the Seeqpod executives, and in a move that may well raise the ire of countless developers, a developer named Ryan Sit who happened to tap into the Seeqpod API.
The legality of Seeqpod is murky. The company says that it doesn’t store any songs, but instead streams them from countless music files littering sites across the web. In effect, it acts as a powerful music search engine with a media player built in. The record industry claims that this is still illegal, and the new EMI complaint goes as far as to say that Seeqpod actually does host some of these music files, at least temporarily (which would strike a major blow to Seeqpod’s defense if proven true). In any case, Seeqpod is clearly on some shaky legal ground, so the new lawsuit doesn’t come as a surprise.
What is surprising, and potentially very alarming, is the fact that Ryan Sit was named in the suit for running the one-man startup Favtape, which leverages the Seeqpod API to stream music. Sit has created a number of sites, including Swurl and FavThumbs. In short, he’s a prolific developer who takes advantage of the APIs offered by many popular websites.
Favtape allows users to create playlists of their favorite songs, which are then streamed using the Seeqpod API. Favtape never hosts any of these files. At its core, it’s essentially just a fancy front-end for Seeqpod. In my past coverage of Favtape, I’ve noted that the site would become virtually useless if Seeqpod ever got sued. But it never crossed my mind that the site itself, and the man who built it, would also be named in the case. For one, there are dozens of other sites that use the Seeqpod API to do exactly what Favtape does. Why was Favtape singled out? There’s also the fact that – given the already murky laws surrounding Seeqpod – Favtape is yet one more degree removed from any possible transgressions.
If EMI does win, it would set a precedent that the usage of an API puts the developer at risk of a lawsuit should the service they’re tapping into ever get sued. Such a decision would have huge ramifications for developers, who could become weary of using any service that could conceivably be considered illegal. It would stifle innovation. And frankly, it’s ridiculous.
For more, check out this post by Michael Robertson.
This is just getting ridiculous.
Why don’t they just get it over with and sue the entire online population that has ever used a search engine? Search engine do (gasp!) index mp3’s you know.
Please find your self a business model instead of trying to sue everyone and making yourself look ridiculous.
From India
Anjali Sen
Like the RIAA at large, EMI is just starting with the little guys who don’t have the money to defend themselves in order to get precedent going with which they can extort other companies and/or trade hookers ‘n blow to congresspeople in order to get laws changed or created.
Agree 100%. The music industry has their collective heads up their asses. Zero innovation, completely reactive. It’s all about trying to constrain rather than embracing and innovating. Jesus they’ve had how many years to get out in front of this? It’s almost 10 years since Napster became widely used.
these music companies are the online version of peta
Your analogy makes no sense.
cry me a river blah ha ha
analogy makes perfect sense. compassionate PETA mauled to death by cuddly bear it thinks it is protecting, would kill human before animal.
PETA = no common sense!
It’s the death throws of a dying industry.
jason…
your linking to the post by robertson has nothing to do with the fundamental issues at hand regarding if/whether it’s legal for seeqpod to do what they do.
having a simple search engine… yeah, they could get away with it, but who would really want just that.. too many steps for the end user to step through…
which is why they “stream”… however, as any good software dev/eng knows.. when you stream, you have streaming servers, that allow the content to be accessed by the user.. now, if seeqpod can say, that they only “point/redirect” the user to a 3rd party site that’s the originator of the stream, they can try. But that’s a flimsy argument at best. At some point, it appears that the “bits” that make up the streamed song are passing through hardware controlled by seeqpod..
sounds like they might want another biz model…
peace
Actually Sam, any good software dev/eng knows you do not need streaming servers to stream with flash. The technology is called ‘progressive download’ becuase it starts playing the music while the download is still occuring…. These files likely never touch a Seeqpod server and are simply downloaded directly to the flash client on the users computer (similar to the Youtube player)
rich…
you are partially correct.. might even be more than partial.. need to knwo exactly how seeqpod works… but i’m willing to bet that a portion of the streamed file touches the seeqpod hardware…
but since i’ve never used seeqpod, diding’t even think about the flash aspect… my bad!!
peace!
It’s snappy!
Favtape is down due to server crashing issues.
In the mean time you can check out PicClick instead! Redirecting in 5 seconds…
This really inspires me to go out and buy an album from HMV. ahem.
Singling this guy Sit out seems grossly unfair, it’s an attempt to fear monger. Even if he does get in trouble, there are countless hordes of nameless and untraceable developers out there who will take his place, piracy for the sake of piracy.
The big labels can’t control the internet, full stop.
Why has no one charged the RIAA for illegally accessing pirated music? For them to know that it is there they had to access it. If it is illegal for me to access it even if I own a copy of the song on CD then it just as illegal for them to access it even if they are legal representatives of the copyright holder. It is not lawful to commit a crime to identify or prevent a crime. This is vigilante justice why is the government allowing it?
How many times has the RIAA or their representatives illegally accessed pirated songs from artists that they do not represent? How much have they paid in fines and reparations to these copyright holders?
They should be compelled publicly disclose this information to prove they are not criminals.
I would dare to claim they or their representative have never knowingly violated the DMCA.
What I think is more poisonous is that others will follow – and not just for music. Book publishers, movie distributors, photographers, etc. will sue the company, the founder (even if no longer associated with the company), the investors, and the API users, too. They’ve already sued the users so its a natural extension of the practice. Maybe this is what they meant by them stopping their campaign to sue college students.
Do I have anything to worry about with my website lastvid.com? It searches Youtube for videos of the most popular songs from Last.fm and Amazon.
DMCA Fail
It has created organized extortion of DMCA violators with profit as the motive.
That is call “Organized Crime”, where real law enforcement?
Please fix this law.
I personally think the major labels will continue this downward spiral. Taking on a guy that taps an API? Seriously? I know music fans are turning to local bands and artists for entertainment in droves these days (footnote 1). First and foremost, it’s much more affordable. You typically don’t have to pay out your nose to go to a live show, and you can often get awesome Indie Music CDs for $10 or less.
Given the economic situation, I think these large labels have it all wrong. They need to figure out how to monetize music in the digital era.
Allen, founder
madtownlounge.com
(1) check the traffic for madtownlounge.com – it’s almost doubled this year alone after two years of rather steady growth
Music needs more nowadays, they need to be more entertaining, mabye they should use these (www.roboticsbm.blogspot.com) performing robots to spice things up
I hate the music industry, I can’t wait for them to finish up their whole dying process.
I think there is something I have to point out here. It is NOT the music industry that is doing this! It is the major recording industry section OF the music industry. But not the entire industry.
Majors have gone from prevalence to irrelevance. Even their employees see that. Who themselves remind me of that George Clinton Pfunk phrase “America Eats its Young” because they (majors) are purging themselves of their most talented people by mistreating and firing them.
You dont stop a virus from spreading in your body by bloodletting. 19th century medics proved that with the multiple deaths.
Again its the major section. Think of it like IBM getting mad and suing someone. Though historically known, how much do they really matter in today’s TechCrunch world?
So next time the major labels AKA “grampa simpson” says “the creek run dry” respond by going to the faucet and handing them a glass of water, patting them on the head and leading back to bed.
do be fair I am not suprised I canned an app because I needed music and looked at using this api and figured out that there was no protection.
The problem is there is no defense against using it as the app might not store the music but it does use it.
about the music industy gave developers a method for using music with an upsell option.
I hope the judge sides with the developer on this one.
I wish the music industry could die as quickly as Jade Goody.
Cybershoplifter from London
Favtape had some issues, if you were smart enough you could download your entire tape to .mp3 files on your PC. Maybe this is the real reason for bringing them to court.
i love this. i totally think they should go after all the developers.
they can chase me all the way to thailand baby
Thanks for the nice article!
“In my past coverage of Favtape, I’ve noted that the site would become virtually useless if Seeqpod ever got sued”
Perhaps your last post introduced the labels to Favtape…
I know a lot of sites – including my own – that use the API. It sucks putting your site’s livelihood in the hands of another company, but it’s too good a service to pass up!
When will the music industry stop? They need to quit chasing after these sites and instead try and figure out a way to potentially make money in ways that don’t involve suing every online music source.
Seeing as they sued them for using the Seeqpod API it makes me wonder if that was the reason we saw the fall of social music sharing site Mixwit as well. Mixwit used Seeqpod, Skreemr, and a couple others to provide songs for their online mixtapes. http://www.musi...it-to-shutdown/
Sounds like a good call to arms for all developers.
Band together with some good IP masking and hammer these incompetent execs & lawyers who can’t figure out creative, innovative ways to use technology and monetize it, and simply try to quash anyone who does.
there’s nothing worse than raising the ire of a huge group of smart people against you.
If seeqpod is liable for temporarily having the files, which they aren’t because of the cache non-liability clause, then every ISP would also be liable when someone illegally downloaded music, etc.
Seeqpod needs to download at least the header of the mp3 file in order to read it’s id3 tags and index it. in much the same way that a web search engine downloads and reads html to get meta data.
So, while Seeqpod servers arent’t touched at all in the streaming process – client flash (or javafx, or silverlight, or – gasp – HTML5 – players go straight to the source server – they DO download and store (albeit temporarily, in RAM probably, but this makes little difference) the files they index.
This is murky terroritory. With torrent files, the original source – the copyright content – need never touch the tracker. With music indexing, where the web is grepped, the copyright content does touch the indexing server, even if it’s not involved in the final download.
Seeqpod makes it very possible to search for and download mp3 files, even if their client, and most clients of their API (not that anyone needs it, just hack their Ajax calls, higher quality results too). One could rebuild something with similar functionality to AudioGalaxy out of Seeqpod pretty easy.
Nevertheless. The major labels of the music industry should shed their supply chain assets while so few remain, and concentrate on the money makers remaining, like merchandise, gigs, and personal appearances.
It’s good to listen to free music, but just to be fair to the other side, what about the copyright violations and innovation disincentive the music industry artists face when their creations get pirated?
Record companies are embarrassing themselves on their way down.
I used to be angry at them for pulling things like this but now feel a little sorry for them.
They are like the bully from high school who graduates and finds himself at McDonalds while the nerds he used to pick on go on to change the world.
10-1 this is going to be another mind blowing stupid argument about how the data is cached in ram for a few micro seconds.
Thought – seeqpod now have many concurrent clients. Why not get them to check out the id3 tags, so that the mp3 files need never touch a seeqpod server?