Like you, I had to sit through years of those “You wouldn’t steal a car” anti-piracy videos on DVDs that I had paid for. Ironically, people who actually pirated their DVDs didn’t have to see any of that, but that’s a conversation for another day.
The point is that we’ve been told over and over by the powers that be that piracy is a cardinal sin. However, if you’re a big up-and-coming company, it seems this is a case of “rules for thee, but not for me.”
Spotify has some piratical rumors from the early days
It’s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission, I guess?
Credit: Lucas Gouveia/How-To Geek
I was watching a documentary about The Pirate Bay the other day, detailing how the founders went into hiding and eventually did some jail time. One segment in this interesting documentary that caught me off guard was when someone claimed that pirated MP3s kick-started Spotify.
Really? The poster child for legal music streaming started off with music someone ripped from a CD? According to an interview with those in-the-know by TorrentFreak, this was indeed the case, and you can read all about it in Spotify Teardown: Inside the Black Box of Streaming Music.
It seems that (allegedly) the early ad-supported beta of Spotify used torrents at least in part to build up the music selection, and then after proving the model worked, the record labels came onboard to make it all nicely aboveboard. You can see all the wild details in MagnateMedia’s The Illegal Rise of Spotify.
Crunchyroll was born from fansubber culture
I was there in the trenches
20 years ago, anime had no presence in my home country, nor was it really the phenomenon it became across the world yet. Since the shows we, anime geeks, wanted to watch were not officially available in the West, it was up to fan translators to distribute their work. Today I have an extensive DVD and Blu-ray anime collection, but in the early 2000s it basically wasn’t an option.
Crunchyroll started off as a site hosting and sharing pirated anime content in the mid-2000s (as per The Seattle Times), and, of course, it was the work of fansubbers you’d find on the site. Today, Crunchyroll is an anime juggernaut and the crown jewel of Sony Entertainment’s anime brands.
YouTube didn’t police things so tightly at first
Back then, YouTube was never gonna give you up to the authorities
Credit:
Corbin Davenport / Google
Today, YouTube is the biggest video streaming site in the world and mostly filled with user content by creators from everywhere. The platform is fierce at policing copyright infringement using sophisticated technology built to ID even a tiny snippet of music or a few frames of a movie.
Before Google bought YouTube, things were way more gung-ho, and people uploaded all sorts of content they had no right to. A major reason YouTube is such a big deal is thanks to that content system, which makes advertisers and IP holders happy. Without early users coming to the site because there were all sorts of videos, not all of it legal to host, Google may never have been interested in buying the platform at all.
You will still find some unlicensed content on YouTube today, but it’s mainly stuff where there’s no one left to make a copyright claim, so it hangs around in a grey area.
Google Books stepped over the line
More of that permission thing
Credit: Tor Books
Google Books is a massive project to digitize and index millions of books from library collections and new books that are available as eBooks. By digitizing these books, it became possible to search for specific book content, as a boon for researchers or anyone who needed to find citations in specific books, some of which had never been digitized.
Google argued that this was an example of Fair Use, but many of the publishers didn’t agree. This led to a massive class action lawsuit. In Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc., after an appeal, final judgment was given in 2015, stating that the “project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law.”
Funnily enough, we’re seeing a similar thing happening again, but with the opposite result. The people behind AI model training want to claim fair use when ingesting content like books to give their LLMs knowledge. However, it remains to be seen if the courts will agree that this is Fair Use, particularly without the public interest angle.
SoundCloud had dubious remixes
Remix culture is always on the fringes
SoundCloud is an amazing resource for people who make original music. Even my own music is on there. However, when you sample, cover, or remix other people’s work, you need legal permission. For example, back when we recorded our music, we paid a license fee for the two covers on our album.
Today, SoundCloud will take down your remix if you don’t have the right permissions. However, the hosting of unlicensed music remains a problem for SoundCloud. The company was sued for failing to secure licenses for 4500 songs, as one example.
SoundCloud has always needed to walk a tightrope with copyright. A big part of the site’s success comes from creative users who are part of remix culture, creating amazing viral remixes and mashups.
My life would certainly not be complete if I had never heard Mullet With Butterfly Wings.
