[oldmanjay]

I hope that you're logically consistent and also consider other people who make their money by trampling on rights to be gutsy. for instance, gangsters, fraudsters, spammers... all have a similar business model in that they make money by ignoring the legal framework of their chosen business. certainly does take guts!

[mdorazio]

To be fair, the same can be said of Uber and Airbnb, both of which are largely praised on HN in the same way.

[whichfawkes]

How are those services trampling on anyone's rights?

Despite loving Grooveshark, I tend to agree that copyright has some meaning and purpose. I don't think taxi companies have a right to business just because they were there first.

[tptacek]

The subtext is that they're pushing on and in many cases breaking regulations (on carriage service and short-term tenancy), and also externalizing their costs. I happen to believe that's actually true in both cases, but that doesn't make what they're doing equivalent to building a business on someone else's proprietary IP.

[chimeracoder]

> I happen to believe that's actually true in both cases, but that doesn't make what they're doing equivalent to building a business on someone else's proprietary IP.

Drop the "intellectual" part of "intellectual property" and that's exactly what AirBNB is doing - tenants are literally using property that isn't theirs (they've leased it, but they don't own it)[0] and are making money off it.

And in doing so, they are also impacting others' property rights, since the externalities of short-term tenancy are borne by neighbors, not by the person who lists a whole-apartment rental on AirBNB.

[0] And given how hard the music industry has been pushing the line "you don't own the music you buy; you're only leasing rights to access it" for digital downloads (not just streaming), this isn't really that different a situation.

[tptacek]

I agree, but that part of Airbnb's usage pattern is bound to change, and the service will easily survive that change. Grooveshark, on the other hand, can't survive a correction from proscribed uses.

[whichfawkes]

I'd argue that they make it easier for individuals to exercise rights they should have. They're merely centralized listings that make it easy to connect buyers and sellers of services in transport/lodging markets.

Fundamentally, if I own a property I should be able to allow/disallow access to anyone as I see fit, and charge appropriately. If I make money, I'm still obligated to pay taxes on it (therein, I imagine, lie the problems).

So I'd claim that AirBnB and Uber are helping push for more sane regulations which allow free-er markets, while Grooveshark was basically just short of directly-stealing the content of others to profit on themselves.

That said, I'd still rather have Grooveshark than not, because I personally don't care so much about the record-companies rights - but certainly the government should be there to help uphold the rights of individuals and businesses, which, alas, means legal trouble for Grooveshark.

[tptacek]

If you buy a property in the middle of residential Oak Park, on a sleepy block lined with bungalow houses, do you have the right to open up a bar in it? How about a 24/7 metal machining shop? A noxious waste processing plant?

Where do we draw the line, and why do we draw it there?

It's not an abstract question: the regs that Airbnb pushes on are society's current answer to that question. They're going to change, as I think we can all see, but how far will they change? That's an extremely important and immediately impactful question right now.

Meanwhile, bringing this back around to Grooveshark: copyright is unlikely to change in ways that would be meaningful to Grooveshark.

[drewcrawford]

There is a difference between what you are describing (commercial zoning) and what AirBnB does (length of tenancy). Commercial zoning is much more obviously a legitimate government function than length of tenancy, which is a textbook economic rigidity.

But to answer your question seriously, I think the Japanese have a better zoning system than in the US, theirs allows for, in limited quantities, a bar in a residential neighborhood, or even an apartment next to a machining shop. The insight here is that it does no one any good to have a long commute, and so they have a system that affords landowners choices about the kind of neighbors they want to have, rather than dumping them all into residential-only zones.

[tptacek]

I disagree strongly that Uber or Airbnb and Grooveshark are comparable.

[TeMPOraL]

Yeah, I tend to find AirBnB and especially Uber worse. Also, Uber seems to be run by sociopaths.

[tptacek]

I'm pretty ambivalent about the picture I've gotten of Uber's management but would generally advise against labeling people we don't really know as "sociopaths".

Though, hustling senior citizens with bizarre Wii tennis mastery does make one think.

[dreamfactory2]

I guess gangsters are a species of hacker in a sense

[TeMPOraL]

I think a lot depends on whether you gain or suffer from their services, and also on the coolness factor. Your garden variety extortionist, mugger or trigger man is boring, but articles about drug trafficking using UAVs or microsubmarines tend to gain traction among tech crowd. Uber and AirBnB have just a huge coolness factor - because they have a mobile app! - but generally, it's a typical pattern of "let's make money giving a group of people some value, dumping externalities on someone else, social order be damned".

[whichfawkes]

Without commenting on whether I think "gutsy" is good or accurate in this instance, it's worth saying that copyright is a civil issue, not a criminal issue. AFAIK, the people at Grooveshark haven't been threatening to break anyone's kneecaps...

[tptacek]

That's not true at all. Copyright infringement is a criminal issue exactly in cases where it's done with commercial intent, and not just in the USA. It predates both music file sharing and the commercial, public Internet.

[cryptophreak]

This is like saying that McDonald’s and American Apparel share a similar business model in that they make money by ignoring the more obscure commandments in classical Hebrew scripture.

The claim only sounds meaningful to people who subscribe to the particular framework in question. To everyone else it’s trivial.