Facebook Stops The Music! Audio Application For Copyright Violation
Published by Rodney Rumford July 31st, 2007 in Facebook, Facebook Applications, Facebook News, Facebook f8 platform, facebook developer.You will notice that we have never reviewed audio applications here. The reasons are varied, but we quite candidly were concerned with the copyright and legal issues that these applications presented.
Well today we can report that Facebook has officially killed audio sharing application Audio. The Audio application was developed by a outside third party that built the application to run on Facebook’s F8 Platform.
The Audio application allowed users to upload songs in mp3 format and then share them with each other and listen to them within Facebook. The application had over 730,000 users on facebook according to appaholic.
This is actually a really smart move on the part of facebook. It shows that they take copyright violation seriously. This also eliminates them from any messy legal issues from the music industry. For all you developers that read this blog, let this be a lesson to you. Stay on the right side of legal issues or risk having the carpet pulled out from under you. Develop gray area applications at your own risk.
Facebook also recently undated their developers terms and conditions (TOC) documents and this change put Audio clearly in violation. Venture beat has some interesting insights regarding Facebook and copyrights that you can read here.
This is the first big example of facebook flexing it’s growing muscles that their platform has given them. Bummer for Audio, they took a gamble and lost. The Wild West of facebook just got a little tamer. 
Facebook = Judge and Jury: Good or Bad?
Technorati Tags: facebook legal, facebook toc, facebook audio, copyright, copyright violation, facebook application
Where legal issues abound, I have to vote for good. Because one minor legal issue could really shut them down - look at how Viacom has gone apeshit over YouTube. What if Google hadn’t bought them? They’d go bankrupt even trying to fight.
On the other hand, part of me wants to know what happened to the line of copyright law that said you could share music for personal use? Wasn’t this the compromise that allowed technology to advance? Without this clause, tape recorders that saved radio streams may never have been legal, which would have retarded the tape industry, which wouldn’t have given rise to CD copy and back up, etc.
The part of me that used to be a performing artist feels like the music industry should be ashamed of itself here, it’s not like they get the lion’s share of profits from CDs. Songs on the radios are really just commercials for CDs, which are commercials for videos, which are commercials for the real money, touring. That’s where the huge money is made - with big artists, they can make as much filling a stadium at $25- $75 a pop in one concert than the artist takes home from a platinum record.
Anyway, before this turns into a blog post, I’ll let someone else speak.
What a disappointing situation, I think its very unfortunately that the recorse for many music sharing services is to simply shut them down.
While I would suggest that there are many cases of abuse, the Audio application would be very useful for many smaller and independent musicians to self-promote.
There are many tools for detecting and curtailing copyright materials:
http://www.wavedna.com/
http://www.musicip.com/
Cutting off the whole application would seem to be rather extreme…