@liamgooding - you bring up a very important point.
Probably every major social site faces legal and/or moral questions on how to handle user submissions. Digg infamously faced DMCA takedown notices when its community continually submitted a 32-digit key that was used to hack HD-DVD copy protection. In the end, @kevinrose chose not to remove these posts.
Content creators should get paid for their work. I also want to avoid instrumenting my own moral or editorial opinion on the community if I can help it. Happy to chat about it via email (ryan[at]producthunt.com) if you'd like, Liam!
@liamgooding - good thoughts. I try to "lead by example" and highlight those contributing thoughtfully to communicate the behavior I'm trying to grow but maybe they should be more explicit.
P.S. Digg is no doubt different than it used to be but it still drives a ton of traffic from conversations I've had with betaworks folks.
Interesting discussion! My understanding of those "music + picture" youtube videos was that they're qualified as Fair Use, so the copyright of the new work belongs to the "pirate" who created/uploaded it, who presumably has no monetization options anyway. If it's indeed using those 2nd tier crowdsourced music videos, I'm not so sure the "artists should get paid" argument is even relevant here.
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Not the first service pulling audio from YouTube API (+ Last.fm API to get the covers), it's just an hack. By the way, not the best timing for YouTube (especially when HipHop tagline says: " We believe that listening to music should always be free and available to everyone, and that only owning it should bare a cost."), given the licensing fight w/ the indie labels for their upcoming music subscription service .
@staringispolite everyone loves to claim fair use online, but whether or not you make money really has no bearing. Those videos are copyright violations. Fair use covers Jon Stewart when he uses short news clips in order to comment on them. That's not considered a copy or a derivative work. Making a lyric video with an unlicensed song is a violation of the artist's copyright.
That said, I'm 100% with @_jacksmith as this related to PH. I'd imagine the typical user here doesn't want inconsistent 128k music. This is an interesting hack and and interesting discussion. Unless there's a DMCA there's no reason to subtract value from the community.
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As far as I know YouTube pays the artists even if the video was uploaded by the users. So, this service (and other YouTube API services) are actually making money for the artists.
And HipHop is not an illegal service and it's legit just like Grooveshark and lots of others.
My only concern is that these days it's actually hard to find videos on the largest video site out there. It's all still images with audio. sad.
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