It's not the same. When you consume music for free, you're consuming a product without paying the person that put the largest amount of work into it. Laws aside, where's the ethics in that?
In the music business there is certainly a fairness issue of middlemen taking a large cut, but Grooveshark is not solving that.
are you comparing laws and copyright infringement?
Grooveshark takes content created by someone else and then profits from the distribution of that content without permission and without passing back any revenue to the rightful owner of the content. How does that compare to uber?
copyright infringement is also 'law'... so I'm comparing laws with laws.
I'm not comparing the individual actions of the companies. Only that sometimes "the law" is not useful anymore.
Which yes, I am saying that copyright needs to change, the notion of a 'rightful owner of content' needs to change. Having laws that are completely contrary to how society operates are generally doomed to fail.
I'm not sure where this type of opinion came from but it definitely has been becoming more prevalent in the last 5 years. I think it is just people are becoming more inclined to think they are entitled to someones else's creative content just because it has been easy to acquire free for years now.
Just because it is easy to copy music online doesn't mean all music should be 'free' and every artist should just abandon what many of them rely on to make a living just because you want to save some money on your entertainment.
I will point out that copyright is extended to creatives by the general population as a mutually beneficial agreement to foster the development of creative works to be shared with said population. In the past five years, and to some extent before that, certain groups have started to abuse that relationship. I should come as no surprise that the attitudes towards the arrangement are starting to change. When the mutually beneficial part starts to erode, something is bound to give.