Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Multiply - Share your illegal stuff with your friends

In the shadow of the current discussion on "to DRM or not to DRM" is still the background-issue that has been playing for years now: illegal filesharing. I thought the situation was under control, though of course, it's still a serious threat to the music business (and any other business that depends on intellectual property rights for its income).

The more shocking it was for me to discover Multiply.com, a sort of social community in the style of myspace. Apparently, it is possible on Multiply to upload music files without limit. Registered users can download these. The user agreement says you are not allowed to violate intellectual property.

However, Multiply appears to be a nest of illegal filesharers. Indeed, my very first encounter with the site was a profile which was sharing some tens of artists, one of which I looked into had over a hundred MP3-files for the taking.. so he must have been sharing hundreds. It's not an exception.. everywhere I went, as far as that's possible on the very not-browsable member structure of Multiply (I used google domain search for some test), there were signs of this. Not all of them that extreme and some not even illegal.. I encountered a profile that was making a stand against the infringement practices on Multiply.

I was shocked and decided to look into the Terms of Multiply.com a little better. I found this:

You represent, warrant and agree that no materials of any kind submitted by you or otherwise posted or shared by you through the Service will violate or infringe upon the rights of any third party, including copyright, trademark, privacy, publicity or other personal or proprietary rights or contain libelous, defamatory or otherwise unlawful material, or violate any other laws or regulations.

You understand and agree that Multiply may, but is not obligated to, review and delete any Member Content that, in the sole judgment of Multiply, violate this Agreement or which might be offensive, illegal, or that might violate the rights, harm, or threaten the safety of Multiply, Multiply's Members or users, or the public, without notice. Multiply assumes no responsibility for monitoring the content posted on the Web site by Members or the conduct of its Members.


In other words, they're saying: "You're not allowed to commit crimes in my home. I'll be sitting here, and I preserve the right to watch and stop if you start committing crimes, but I am not obligated to put you out of my home and I don't take responsibility for anything you do under my nose." I find this disturbing. Quite apart from the fact that they're wrong to be so careless in their dealing with the lawfulness what happens on their site, they're also accomplices. The user is not only, let's say, dealing drugs in the home of Multiply. He's storing the raw cocaine in his basement!

Of course, this is an old method of landowners getting rich on criminals using their warehouses for storage of stolen property. "We don't know what's in there and we don't care as long as they pay us." However, when you see white traces of cocaine running from the warehouse to the quay, who wants to claim that the owner doesn't know the contents of his warehouse?

My advice to Multiply is the following: try to convince the judge that you thought those MP3's were all very popular meditative recordings of nature sounds. It might help.

My call to everyone else: boycott Multiply, or sue them.

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