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397 points pyman | 49 comments | | HN request time: 0.829s | source | bottom
1. marapuru ◴[] No.44489031[source]
Apparently it's a common business practice. Spotify (even though I can't find any proof) seems to have build their software and business on pirated music. There is some more in this Article [0].

https://torrentfreak.com/spotifys-beta-used-pirate-mp3-files...

Funky quote:

> Rumors that early versions of Spotify used ‘pirate’ MP3s have been floating around the Internet for years. People who had access to the service in the beginning later reported downloading tracks that contained ‘Scene’ labeling, tags, and formats, which are the tell-tale signs that content hadn’t been obtained officially.

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2. motbus3 ◴[] No.44489057[source]
They had a second company (which I don't remember the name) that allowed users to backup and share their music. When they were exposed they dug that as deep as they could
replies(1): >>44489100 #
3. pyman ◴[] No.44489086[source]
It was the opposite. Their mission was to combat music piracy by offering a better, legal alternative.

Daniel Ek said: "my mission is to make music accessible and legal to everyone, while ensuring artists and rights holders got paid"

Also, the Swedish government has zero tolerance for piracy.

replies(2): >>44489565 #>>44491607 #
4. KoolKat23 ◴[] No.44489089[source]
There's plenty of startups gone legitimate.

Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.

Plenty of people have ideas.

We only really see those that successfully cross it.

Small things EULA breaches, consumer licenses being used commercially for example.

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5. pyman ◴[] No.44489100[source]
No. There's no credible evidence Spotify had any secret second company that allowed users to back up and share music without authorisation
6. pyman ◴[] No.44489121[source]
There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music.

This is a narrative that gets passed around in certain circles to justify stealing content.

replies(2): >>44489138 #>>44490650 #
7. pjc50 ◴[] No.44489130[source]
"recording obtained unofficially" and "doesn't have rights to the recording" are separate things. So they could well have got a license to stream a publisher's music but that didn't come with an actual copy of some/all of the music.
8. YPPH ◴[] No.44489138{3}[source]
"Stealing" isn't an apt term here. Stealing a thing permanently deprives the owner of the thing. What you're describing is copyright infringement, not stealing.

In this context, stealing is often used as a pejorative term to make piracy sound worse than it is. Except for mass distribution, piracy is often regarded as a civil wrong, and not a crime.

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9. KoolKat23 ◴[] No.44489344{4}[source]
Best/most succinct explanation I've seen to date.
10. KoolKat23 ◴[] No.44489351{5}[source]
Properly remixing the content so that it can be considered distinct would be fair use. You can't copyright a style, concept or idea.

Also mostly this would be a civil lawsuit for "damages".

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11. pyman ◴[] No.44489545{6}[source]
It might be legal in the US, but not in the rest of the world.

The trial is scheduled for December 2025. That’s when a jury will decide how much Anthropic owes for copying and storing over seven million pirated books

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12. pyman ◴[] No.44489565[source]
I know this might come as a shock to those living in San Francisco, but things are different in other parts of the world, like Uruguay, Sweden and the rest of Europe. From what I’ve read, the European committee actually cares about enforcing the law.
13. techjamie ◴[] No.44490004[source]
Crunchyroll was originally an anime piracy site that went legit and started actually licensing content later. They started in mid-2006, got VC funding in 2008, then made their first licensing deal in 2009.

https://www.forbes.com/2009/08/04/online-anime-video-technol...

https://venturebeat.com/business/crunchyroll-for-pirated-ani...

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14. lmm ◴[] No.44490650{3}[source]
> There's no credible evidence Spotify built their company and business on pirated music.

That's a statement carefully crafted to be impossible to disprove. Of course they shipped pirated music (I've seen the files). Of course anyone paying attention knew. Nothing in the music industry was "clean" in those days. But, sure, no credible evidence because any evidence anyone shows you you'll decide is not credible. It's not in anyone's interests to say anything and none of it matters.

15. haiku2077 ◴[] No.44490845[source]
Good Old Games started out with the founders selling pirated games on disc at local markets.
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16. hinterlands ◴[] No.44490928[source]
The problem is that these "small things" are not necessarily small if you're an individual.

If you're an individual pirating software or media, then from the rights owners' perspective, the most rational thing to do is to make an example of you. It doesn't happen everyday, but it does happen and it can destroy lives.

If you're a corporation doing the same, the calculation is different. If you're small but growing, future revenues are worth more than the money that can be extracted out of you right now, so you might get a legal nastygram with an offer of a reasonable payment to bring you into compliance. And if you're already big enough to be scary, litigation might be just too expensive to the other side even if you answer the letter with "lol, get lost".

Even in the worst case - if Anthropic loses and the company is fined or even shuttered (unlikely) - the people who participated in it are not going to be personally liable and they've in all likelihood already profited immensely.

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17. dathinab ◴[] No.44490949[source]
not just Spotify pretty much any (most?) current tech giant was build by

- riding a wave of change

- not caring too much about legal constraints (or like they would say now "distrupting" the market, which very very often means doing illigal shit which beings them far more money then any penalties they will ever face from it)

- or caring about ethics too much

- and for recent years (starting with Amazone) a lot of technically illegal financing (technically undercutting competitors prices long term based on money from else where (e.g. investors) is unfair competitive advantage (theoretically) clearly not allowed by anti monopoly laws. And before you often still had other monopoly issues (e.g. see wintel)

So yes not systematic not complying with law to get unfair competitive advantage knowing that many of the laws are on the larger picture toothless when applied to huge companies is bread and butter work of US tech giants

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18. dathinab ◴[] No.44490988[source]
but it's not some small things

but systematic wide spread big things and often many of them, giving US giant a unfair combative advantage

and don't think if you are a EU company you can do the same in the US, nop nop

but naturally the US insist that US companies can do that in the EU and complain every time a US company is fined for not complying for EU law

19. Workaccount2 ◴[] No.44490996[source]
The common meme is that megacorps are shamelessly criminalistic organizations that get away with doing anything they can to maximize profits, while true in some regard, totally pales in comparison to the illegal things small businesses and start-ups do.
20. Cyph0n ◴[] No.44491155[source]
Yep, they were huge too - virtually anyone who watched free anime back then would have known about them.

My theory is that once they saw how much traffic they were getting, they realized how big of a market (subbed/dubbed) anime was.

21. ungreased0675 ◴[] No.44491173{5}[source]
There seems to be an unwritten rule for VC-backed tech companies, that if a law is broken at massive scale and very quickly, it’s ok. It’s the fait accompli strategy many of the large tech companies used to get where they are.

Don’t have legal access to training data? Simply steal it, but move fast enough to keep ahead of the law. By the time lawsuits hit the company is worth billions and the product is embedded in everyday life.

22. eviks ◴[] No.44491607[source]
Mission is just words, they can mean the opposite of deeds, but they can't be the opposite, they live in different realms.
23. Shank ◴[] No.44491662[source]
And now Crunchyroll is owned by (through a lot of companies, like Aniplex of America, Aniplex, A1 Pictures) Sony, who produces a large amount of anime!
24. reaperducer ◴[] No.44491664[source]
Apparently it's a common business practice.

It's not a common business practice. That's why it's considered newsworthy.

People on the internet have forgotten that the news doesn't report everyday, normal, common things, or it would be nothing but a listing of people mowing their lawns or applying for business loans. The reason something is in the news is because it is unusual or remarkable.

"I saw it online, so it must happen all the time" is a dopy lack of logic that infects society.

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25. Barrin92 ◴[] No.44491797[source]
>Society underestimates the chasm that exists between an idea and raising sufficient capital to act on those ideas.

The AI sector, famously known for its inability to raise funding. Anthropic has in the last four years raised 17 billion dollars

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26. lysace ◴[] No.44491845[source]
You are missing the point. Spotify had permission from the copyright holders and/or their national proxies to use those songs in a limited beta in Sweden. They didn't have access to clean audio data directly from the record companies, so in many cases they used pirated rips instead.

What you really should be asking is whether they infringed on the copyrights of the rippers. /s

27. pembrook ◴[] No.44491897[source]
It wasn’t just the content being pirated, but the early Spotify UI was actually a 1:1 copy of Limewire.
28. benced ◴[] No.44491900[source]
As you point out, they mostly did this before they were large companies (where the public choice questions are less problematic). Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.
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29. NoMoreNicksLeft ◴[] No.44491910[source]
This isn't as meaningful as it sounds. Nintendo was apparently using scene roms for one of the official emulators on Wii (I think?). Spotify might have received legally-obtained mp3s from the record companies that were originally pulled from Napster or whatever, because the people who work for record companies are lazy hypocrites.
30. jowea ◴[] No.44492247[source]
Uber
31. Paradigma11 ◴[] No.44492457{5}[source]
There are tests that determine if a work infringes on the copyright of another. That is well established law. Just use that test and show that this work is infringing on that work. If you cant it doesn't.
32. fuzzfactor ◴[] No.44492674{7}[source]
You make some good points, this really is going to take some careful judgment and chances are it's too complex for an actual courtroom to yield an ideal outcome.

Now places like Flea markets have been known to have a counterfeit DVD or two.

And there is more than one way to compare to non-digital content.

Regular books and periodicals can be sold out and/or out-of-print, but digital versions do not have these same exact limitations.

A great deal of the time though, just the opposite occurs, and a surplus is printed that no one will ever read, and which will eventually be disposed of.

Newspapers are mainly in the extreme category where almost always a significant number of surplus copies are intentionally printed.

It's all part of the same publication, a huge portion of which no one has ever rightfully expected for every copy to earn anything at all, much less a return on every single copy making it back to the original creator.

Which is one reason why so much material is supported by ads. Even if you didn't pay a high enough price to cover the cost of printing, it was all paid for well before it got into your hands.

Digital copies which are going unread are something like that kind of surplus. If you save it from the bin you should be able to do whatever you want with it either way, scan it how you see fit.

You just can't say you wrote it. That's what copyright is supposed to be for.

Like at the flea market, when two different vendors are selling the same items but one has legitimately purchased them wholesale and the other vendor obtained theirs as the spoils of a stolen 18-wheeler.

How do you know which ones are the pirated items?

You can tell because the original owners of the pirated cargo suffered a definite loss, and have none of it remaining any more.

OTOH, with things like fake Nikes at the flea market, you can be confident they are counterfeit whether they were stolen from anybody in any way or not.

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33. CaptainFever ◴[] No.44492831{7}[source]
Actually, "the rest of the world" has already legalised AI training in the form of Text and Data Mining Exemption laws.
34. bumby ◴[] No.44492874{4}[source]
I think you make a good point, but there is some irony in pointing out the distinction between colloquial and legal use of the term “stealing” while also misusing the term “piracy” to describe legal matters.

It would be more clear if you stick to either legal or colloquial variants, instead of switching back and forth. (Tbf, the judge in this case also used the term “piracy” colloquially).

35. marapuru ◴[] No.44492948[source]
You are right on that. I’ll edit my post to reflect that.

Edit: Apologies, I can’t edit it anymore.

36. seadan83 ◴[] No.44493074{4}[source]
Then it is not possible to 'steal' an idea? Afaik 'to steal'is simply to take without permission. If the thing is abstract, then you might not have deprived the original owner of that thing. If the thing is a physical object, then the implication is tou now have physical possession (in which case your definition seemingly holds)

edit/addendum: considering this a bit more - the extent to which the original party is deprived of the stolen thing is pertinent for awarding damages. For example, imagine a small entity stealing from a large one, like a small creator steals dungeon and dragons rules. That doesn't deprive Hasbro of DnD, but it is still theft (we're assuming a verbatim copy here lifted directly from DnD books)

The example that I was pondering were shows in russia that were almost literally "the sampsons." Did that stop the Simpson's from airing in the US, its primary market? No, but it was still theft, something was taken without permission.

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37. techjamie ◴[] No.44493171{3}[source]
Pirated games translated to Polish if possible, because game devs weren't catering to the market with translations, and Poland didn't respect foreign copyright.
38. KoolKat23 ◴[] No.44493218{3}[source]
I agree, that was the point I was trying to make. It seems small but until the business is up and running at sufficient scale, the costs can be insurmountable.

And the system set up by society doesn't truly account for this or care.

39. KoolKat23 ◴[] No.44493229{3}[source]
Only once chatgpt 3.5 was released...

Other industries do not have it this easy.

40. FirmwareBurner ◴[] No.44493240{3}[source]
>Seems like the breaking of these laws was good for everybody.

Are all music creators better off now than before Spotify?

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41. ◴[] No.44493591{5}[source]
42. bumby ◴[] No.44493633{8}[source]
>If you save it from the bin you should be able to do whatever you want with it either way, scan it how you see fit.

Don’t we already have laws covering this? For example, sometimes excess books can be thrown in the bin. Often, they have the covers removed. Some will say something to the effect that “if you’ve received this without a cover it is a copyright violation.” I think one of the points of the lawsuit is it gives copyright holders discretion as to how their works are used/sold etc. The idea that “if you saved it from the bin you can do with it whatever you want” strips them of that right.

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43. megaman821 ◴[] No.44493772{4}[source]
The music pie is bigger now but it is split between more people. Spotify brings in the most revenue for musicians as a whole.
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44. fuzzfactor ◴[] No.44493955{9}[source]
Another good point, and it's a fine point as well.

You could split hairs over whether saving an item from the bin occurred after a procedure to remove covers and it was already dumped, or before any contemplation was made about if or when dumping would take place.

Saving either way would be preserving what would otherwise be lost, even if it was well premeditated in advance of any imminent risk.

What if it was the last remaining copy?

Or even the only copy ever in existence of an original manuscript?

It's just not a concept suitable for a black & white judgment.

That's a very good sign that probably an entire book of regulations needs to be thrown out instead, and a new law written to replace it with something more sensible.

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45. cmiles74 ◴[] No.44494071[source]
Google Music originally let people upload their own digital music files. The argument at the time was that whether or not the files were legally obtained was not Google’s problem. I believe Amazon had a similar service.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1447323/google-reporte...

46. bumby ◴[] No.44494317{10}[source]
>What if it was the last remaining copy?

Or even the only copy ever in existence of an original manuscript?

I think these still remove the copyright of the author. As it stands, I have the right to write the best novel about the human condition ever conceived and also the right (if copyrighted) to not allow anyone to read it. I can light it on fire if I wish. I am not obligated to sell it to anyone. In the context of the above, I can stipulate that nobody can distribute excess copies even if they would be otherwise destroyed. You may think that’s wasteful or irrational but we have all kinds of rights that protect our ability to do irrational things with our own property.

>That's a very good sign that probably an entire book of regulations needs to be thrown out instead, and a new law written to replace it with something more sensible.

This sentiment implies that you do not think the owner has those rights. That’s fine, but there are plenty of people (myself included) who think those are reasonable rights. Intellectual property clause is in the first article of the US Constitution for a good reason, although I do think it can be abused.

47. oblio ◴[] No.44494854{5}[source]
Is that why the biggest source of income for musicians these days are live shows? Streaming basically killed recording income for 99.9999% of musicians.
48. dathinab ◴[] No.44495266{3}[source]
they where already big when they systematically broke this laws

breaking this laws is what lifted them from big, to supper marked dominant to a point where they have monopoly like power

that is _never_ good for everyone, or even good for the majority long term

what is good for everyone (but a few rich people and sometimes the US government) is proper fair competition. It drives down prices and allows people to vote with their money, a it is a corner stone of the American dream it pushes innovation and makes sure a country isn't left behind. Monopoly like companies on the other hand tend to have exactly the other effect, higher prices (long term), corruption, stagnating innovation, and a completely shattered American sound pretty bad for the majority of Americans.

49. dathinab ◴[] No.44495307{5}[source]
Yeah, but like another post said it killed a lot of other income streams.

And Spotify is a bad example as it ran into another psudo monopoly with very unreasonable/unhealthy power (the few large music labels holding rights to the majority of main stream music).

They pretty much forced very bad terms onto Spotify which is to some degree why Spotify is pushing podcasts, as they can't be long term profitable with Music (raising prices doesn't help if the issue is a percent cut which rises too :/ )