Music Publishers Now Suing Lyrics Sites And Their Execs

from the and-on-it-goes dept

Last week, we noted that LyricWiki had been pressured to kill its API after music publishers threatened it with a lawsuit. In the comments to that post, someone insisted that there haven't been any lawsuits over lyrics online. If that's true, it just changed. Apparently the removal of the API wasn't enough, as the parent company of LyricWiki, Motive Force Web, along with LiveUniverse (the site run by former MySpace exec Brad Greenspan) have both been sued by a group of music publishers, who are insisting that such sites are unfairly "profiting on the backs of songwriters." I'd really like to see them prove that. These sites aren't profiting off the backs of songwriters, they're helping more people find and understand the lyrics of songs they like. That gives fans a closer connection to the music and more reason to buy things which will actually bring songwriters money. It's stunning how shortsighted and backwards the music publishers are being here.

Even worse, the music publishers didn't stop at just suing the two companies here. They also sued the individuals behind them personally. This is a trick that the record labels have been pulling lately as well. It's legalized bullying. These companies realize that by suing execs of these companies personally, it puts that much more pressure on those execs to settle, even though there's no basis whatsoever to go after those execs personally.

So, nice job Peermusic, Warner/Chappell, Bug Music and your lobbying buddies at the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), you've pissed off more music fans, made them less likely to find or be interested in music of the songwriters you represent, and have filed misguided lawsuits against individuals who dared to try to provide useful information to the public.

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Music Publishers Force Lyrics API Offline; How Dare Anyone Make Lyrics Useful

from the lame dept

For many years, music publishers have always hated online lyrics sites. Rather than realizing that such sites help people connect better with songs, the publishers only thought in terms of "copyright infringement." Over the years, they've forced a number of such sites to close down. Chris Takacs points us to the latest such move. At the very least, they're not forcing an entire site offline, but they've forced the owner of a lyrics site to shut off its API. LyricWiki had a nice little API that would allow programmers to embed lyrics from the wiki within their programs... but the music publishers freaked out that people might actually read lyrics without paying for them and sent out the legal muscle. As the article above notes, in an era of digital music, where fewer and fewer people are buying CDs with lyrics in the liner notes, online lyrics sites make more sense than ever before. Why are music publishers so against them?

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UK Gov't Throws Open Data For Mashups; Offers Prize Money For Best Results

from the about-time dept

We were just complaining about the fact that governments should be exposing APIs on certain government data so that people can create more useful services out of them -- and it appears that someone in the UK was having similar thoughts. The government is now opening up a bunch of data to whoever wants to play with it. Not only is the gov't encouraging people to make mash-ups with the data, it's actually offering cash prizes to those who come up with the best results. Nice to see a government doing something smart.

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Facebook Disconnects Google: Protecting Users... Or Itself?

from the privacy-or-competition? dept

Inforworld reports that Facebook has cut off Google's Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook's APIs. Facebook claims that Google Friend Connect "redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect." Techcrunch has more details about what Google was doing and what Facebook objected to. Facebook is getting a fair amount of flack for this decision, and it's not hard to see why. Given that Facebook has just rolled out its own competing service for linking third-party websites to Facebook, we can't help but wonder if the privacy issues aren't just a cover to avoid having to interoperate with a major competitor.

Still, Facebook's privacy concerns aren't totally bogus, and this dispute does illustrate the point we made on Monday about the challenge of building an open API while preserving user privacy. It's true that users ultimately have control over which applications and sites they approve to access their Facebook data. But users aren't necessarily going to know which applications have good privacy policies, nor are they necessarily going to want to invest the time and effort to figure it out. So it's not necessarily a bad thing that Facebook is imposing at least some minimum standards on sites that use their API. And while Google obviously isn't a fly-by-night organization, Facebook may be worrying about the precedent it would set if it started allowing sites to funnel information gleaned from the Facebook APIs to third party sites that Facebook had no control over at all.

Mike Arrington wonders, "How dare Facebook tell ME that I cannot give Google access to this data." I certainly agree with this sentiment in principle, but I think it's missing the way applications work on Facebook. About once a week I get asked to try out some new Facebook application that I've never heard of. I'm already pretty reluctant to approve any of these applications, but I'd be a lot more reluctant if I knew that there was a reasonable chance that signing up would lead to my data being available to random third parties. And in most cases I don't have the time and the interest to research the details of each application's privacy policy. So there's some value in having Facebook enforce reasonable privacy rules on behalf of its users.

But on the other hand, the fact that Facebook can and does arbitrarily disable Facebook apps isn't going to be good for the health of the Facebook ecosystem. If I were a software developer, I would certainly be reluctant to develop for an "open" platform like that. And in the long run, that's a big threat to Facebook's dominance of the social networking universe. Facebook is big, but it's not as big as the rest of the web put together. If a company like Google can figure out how build a usable, open social network atop hundreds of websites, it will give Facebook and MySpace a real run for their money.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Social Networking Sites Turn Outward

from the privacy-challenges dept

The New York Times reports on MySpace's new Data Availability project, which will allow third-party websites to automatically import information from a user's profile, saving the user the hassle of re-entering it on a bunch of different sites. As the Bits blog says, this is a smart move and could be the start of an important trend toward making MySpace a more outward-focused platform. Facebook wasted no time in announcing a program of its own called Facebook Connect that will have similar functionality. And now it looks like Google will rolling out an extension for Open Social that will provide some of the same features. We've said before that the achilles heel of social networking sites is that they're so inwardly-focused. In the long run, it's going to be difficult for any site—even one as large and technically savvy as Facebook or MySpace, to get users to stay inside of a walled garden. The site that figures out how to be a platform that other sites use for identity management will have a huge advantage in the long run. MySpace and Facebook appear to regard this kind of outwardly-focused platform as the next frontier in social networking.

They're going to face some serious challenges in the privacy department, though. We discussed the privacy dilemma with Facebook apps back in January, and both Facebook and MySpace are going to have to grapple with the same set of issues with their new strategies. On the one hand, they need to lock things down sufficiently that one bad (or compromised) application can't suck down a ton of private user data and do bad things with it. On the other hand, if they are too restrictive, it will limit the usefulness of their platforms and discourage third-party websites from using them at all. Striking this balance, and coming up with security mechanisms that give sites the information they need without giving away the store, will be crucial to these initiatives' success.

I think it's possible that these problems will prove intractable. Ordinarily, when we talk about an "open API," we mean an API that anybody can use without any kind of pre-approval, and that doesn't constrain how data received through the API is used. Obviously, MySpace and Facebook aren't going to want to offer an API that's open in this sense; there's too much potential for mischief if an application can trick a user into authorizing a malicious application. So unless they can come up with a really elegant mechanism for limiting the spread of information, there's going to have to be a vetting process, which will mean extra overhead that limits how quickly the platform can grow. It's going to take a lot of ingenuity to make these platforms open enough that a lot of potential partners can participate while keeping them closed enough that they don't become vehicles for the bad guys to cause problems.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Google Finally Realizes It Needs To Be The Web Platform

from the took-'em-long-enough dept

Way back in 2004, we started asking when Google was going to become "the web platform," finally opening up its infrastructure to build out new and useful applications. It seemed obvious at the time that the next real battle was going to be in that space, but time and time again, Google has missed opportunities to do so, opening up a window of opportunity for other players. Surprisingly, the closest to realizing the vision has been Amazon.com with its Amazon Web Services offerings -- which was something no one would have expected back in 2004. Back then, the questions were more about Microsoft, Yahoo and Google. Microsoft, however, can't seem to get past its desktop software DNA (though, it talks a good game) and Yahoo! (typical Yahoo!) has bits and pieces here and there but can't seem to pull together a comprehensive web platform strategy. For a brief period of time, it looked like Facebook might become a true web platform, but it's been too focused on locking apps in rather than enabling outbound efforts.

So, now, finally, nearly four years later, Google has come to its senses and announced its entrance into the web platform space with its aptly named AppEngine offering. In many ways, it's similar to Amazon's offering (which is a good thing!), though much more integrated, which could prove to be either a problem or a benefit depending on what you want to do. Amazon allows for a much more a la carte setup, which could appeal to many, while you have to really embrace Google to enjoy the benefits of its setup. A big open question is pricing. A huge part of the appeal to Amazon's Web Services platform is that it's crazy cheap. You really have to be working it quite hard to build up any sort of significant charges. Google hasn't released info on pricing yet, offering AppEngine up for free to the first 10,000 developers (who appear to have snapped up all the open slots in less than two hours). That free service has some limitations: initially 500 MBs of storage and enough bandwidth to serve approximately 5 million pages per month. There's some suggestion that the final service will always be free up to that level, with charges starting if you go beyond that. If so, that could certainly appeal to people who just want to try some stuff out for free.

While this may seem like something that will only appeal to serious techheads, this could be a really big deal. A lot is going to depend on how well AppEngine really works, and how open it really turns out to be. However, if it really does provide another super cheap (or even free at low levels) full service, highly scalable platform for all different kinds of applications, things could start to get very interesting pretty quickly. Between this and Amazon's Web Services, the very concept of developing online applications may finally start to change in significant ways for the better. The easier it is to develop and deploy highly scalable web applications, the more innovative and creative solutions we're going to start to see.

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How Dare You Make Our Service More Valuable! RealNetworks Shuts Down YottaMusic

from the not-allowed-to-make-things-more-valuable dept

It's sometimes amazing how shortsighted companies can be -- especially when they discover that others are making their own services better and more valuable. We've written about various threats and lawsuits against people who have made better interfaces for websites such as the Ellis Island listings and Odeon Cinemas' site in the UK. Now, as noted by Fred Wilson, it looks like the folks at RealNetworks have forced YottaMusic out of business for making Real's Rhapsody service a lot more userfriendly. TechCrunch suggests that there's some political reasons for the shutdown having to do with what APIs YottaMusic was using, but that's hardly an excuse for shutting down a popular site that only makes Rhapsody's service more valuable by creating an interface that many people prefer to Rhapsody's own interface. Users of YottaMusic still need to be Rhapsody subscribers, so it could only help to increase Real's subscriber numbers -- so it's hard to understand what the business rationale could be for shutting the site down.

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