Music Industry Takes Soulseek to Court
Written by Ernesto on November 20, 2008Soulseek is one the greatest music sharing communities that most of the world has never heard of. Covering all genres, Soulseek is an active network specializing in electronic music, where many of the members are musicians themselves. The music industry, however, sees the filesharing application as a threat, and will go after Soulseek in court.
Last week we reported that French record labels were going after four file-sharing applications, including Limewire and the BitTorrent client Vuze. Now, just days later, two other French organizations are to continue this crackdown and sue Soulseek.
SACEM, the French association for music producers and SCPP, which represents record labels including Universal, EMI, BMG, Warner have filed a complaint against the filesharing application.
The industry bodies argue that Soulseek, an application created by former Napster programmer Nir Arbel, is designed to permit unauthorized access to copyrighted works. According to a French law adopted in 2006, distributing such software is an offense that can lead to a 3 year jail sentence, as well as a fine up to 300,000 euros.
While Soulseek can be used to share any type of file, it is almost exclusively used to share music. Soulseek has a multitude of sub-communities, each dedicated to their chosen musical genres. The members can be incredibly passionate and many of them are experts in their field. Although mainstream music is available, the majority of the files shared on the network are underground independent music.
On the Soulseek website, it is clearly stated that the intention of their application is not to infringe copyright. Instead, it aims “to help unsigned and/or independent artists find a place in the ever-growing music industry, in a place where discussion and the creation of music can take place.”
Similar to other music sharing communities such as the BitTorrent sites What.cd and Waffles.fm, many members are artists themselves, who share their music freely. True to this spirit, members of the Soulseek community founded Soulseek Records (or SLSK Records), a non-profit netlabel where artists publish their music for free, under a Creative Commons license.
Instead of supporting this creative platform, the French music industry continues its witch-hunt, effectively killing their own business. If they are successful, this case, or the lawsuits against the other four p2p clients, will undoubtedly impact other filesharing applications.
Previously: Movie Studios Sue ISP Over BitTorrent Piracy
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65 Responses
What’s next? Attacking and suing the very first rapper they encounter at the streets?
Dumb.
You can take them soulseek, teach them whose boss!!! I wish you the best.
Dumb fu*ks trying to stifle innovation via threats and industry lobbied laws rather than adapt.
The only ones who are going to make a killing on this are the lawyers, the industry is too dumb to see this is going to fail… but everyone else sees the writing clearly on the wall.
F-A-I-L.
im commiting copyright infringement in my mind…
COME SUE ME.. heheheheh…
I just did it again..
and again..
and again..
I declare copyright infringement a international sport! Lets all see who can piss off the industry the most..
so much fun.
I don’t know the laws in France, but…. I would round up all the independent artists and sue SACEM for fucking with their ability to get their name out.
It would be considerably easier for them to qualify lost exposure and revenue than it would be for the music industry to keep making up bullshit metrics regarding revenue loss.
Much like Batman had a ripping box office return, yet was downloaded x amounts of times. Where are your stats now you fuktards.
http://torrentfreak.com/the-dark-knight-conquers-bittorrent-081117/
Note to the industry: I will download any and everything I want because you folks are assholes, period. Ordinarily, you would get my cash at the theater, dvd rental shop, etc. Now you get shit!
J.
Give me a sec guys Im gettin my next splew of spam and obnoxious comments ready.
Roze
@1 : they already did. several times. for insulting france, for insulting the police, etc etc…
fortunately they lost but free speech is slowly disappearing here, it’s less offensive to justice to othsay racist things than to criticize racists nowadays.
Also, there is a law indeed in france since 2006, but it’s only aimed at forbidding software that can help circunvening protections (like AnyDVD, Blindwrite and alikes). But these days it seems the lobbies can do whatever they want, supported by hordes of corrupt journalists and a rotting system.
@3: couple it with the forthcoming hadopi (which should be declared illegal by the european juridiction as soon as voted, hence being another waste of taxpayers’ money), and a recent law that brings the delays to sue someone for defaming up to 1 year (compared to 3 months in the paper press) and you have a nice sketch of dictatorship designed.
Another case the music industry will “yet” again loose. When will they they ever learn to stop spending tax payers money on loosed causes.
http://www.aquariumfish.me
good luck to you, soulseek.
@ 4
The music industry is made up of mostly lawyers… therefore your statement, though true, fails.
not soulseek! I don’t understand this, who gives a shet with what a smelly french court thinks
but i really dislike soulseek. Consider that donating to the authors makes you a prioritary downloader (e.g. not waiting in queues, and overtaking the regular users who can therefore be waiting for ages) is similar to pay per leech.
Actually I can’t understand why people with good share use such a poor program. Even DC is better than soulseek
I guess it would be too much to ask for SLSK to go unnoticed. Actually, I’m surprised that it took this long for somebody to launch a campaign against them. Nearly every other platform or site since Napster has been attacked–many have folded–but always SLSK remained; it is the old faithful of file-sharing.
Good luck SoulSeek with your battle in the french courts. May you be victorious and continue to be a source of independent and interesting music for all the world!
LOL @ 5. I must agree that its a good idea you got their. We should allso all um uh routinley ping uh uhm certaing networks uh uhm all at the uhm same time for the uhm purposes of uhm network monitoring lol. We could start with uh uhm sonys servers lol and uhm have a list incase any of their uh uhm servers are uhm down lol. That way we allways will be pinging lol uhm. We should continue in the uhm line of lets play copyright sport :D. We could allso email the MPAA leters using automated software and complain about their poorly written movies. We just all forward some random madeup lettter to them lol and their gona have a headache with their emails. Allso wes should all makeup our own copyright infringement letters saying that they have stolen our copyrited stuff and used it in their movies and u demmand that they retrieve the memories of the footage from peoples minds and remove the parts where youre stuff was in it. ;d and lol we send them their ip addresses timestamped and say we allso caught u ddosing, leaching and breaching copyright laws but we got yourip we allso sending a copy of this letter to your isps informing them that they are to remove your internet connection. Lol we need to organise some sort of publicl, donation funded arm legal arm of the “Noble Leauge Of Peers” and get them to go after the isps saying that as long as the mpaa will be sending letters to people with ip addreses in that claim someone breachedn copyright laws and forcing isps to disconnect their custormors that we will continue to insist that they be disconected as our claims have just as much legitimacy as theirs and we caught them attempting to track, or ddos us. And if they can use ip addresses in court as evidence and win then so can we. And we claim a trillion dollars in damages and etc from the mpaa for loss of downloads. And we say that we would like them allso to record a public appology to help lessen the effects of their slander in which they admit that copying their work is the way of the future etc etc. Comeon guys lets do it. Make it a real sport. Maybe we can be the jury to. Maybe the Noble leauge of peers can make fundraising pins or something that say im a part of the noble leauge of peers. Then the jurys could wear them to :D. Like we can maybe give them free to famous people and encourage them to wear them to spread the word. Maybe we should have a flag or something we stick outside our house like what gangs have or something and that way they know their driving into our turf lol. We allso put up warning sighns like “RIAA/MPAA and other anti copying organisations beware! we have dogs, we have guns, And there are more of us than you can count. Turn arround now or face the consequences. You have been warned”
Lol comeon you know you want to.
@6 (”Roze”): LOL, you got it, man. She needs to leave here.
holy one huge paragraph batman!
just hit enter like every couple sentences geez
is any of those parties the are sueing actually seated in france? Otherwise who cares what the frog courts decide? Oh noes wikipedia is violating chinese censorship laws, the’re probably going down tomorrow to.
“to help unsigned and/or independent artists find a place in the ever-growing music industry, in a place where discussion and the creation of music can take place.” – BULL! Don’t get me wrong, I use SS as well, but it is not around for the above reason. It’s pretty safe to say that probably only 1% of the music on there is “unsigned” and independent artists (I’m assuming artists not signed to a “major” label) would probably make up 30%. I guess you can say whatever you want for the “intent” is but the reality is the place is a free for all. I usually use SS when I can’t find albums on the private torrent music sites, private DC hubs or blogs.
Another long winded and completely pointless post from jacob.
I suppose ot doesn’t matter though since no one will bother reading past the third line.
we should set up like a team of 50 lawyers that a paid on donations from the community. their job would to fight away these industry dipshi**s.
I don’t get it… are all of these many programs they’re going after based out of france? Otherwise, why does any of this matter? How’s it different from the idiots sending DMCA’s to the pirate bay?
Don’t moderate me bro, I am just a little kid.
Js.
Given the fact that much of the music is independent, original music, the intent of the record companies is clear: to use copyright in any way whatsoever so that they can shut down independent music. Well, I think it should have been clear already, actually, but this makes it more clear.
Suppose that a lot of people in France decided to drop CDs or whatnot of Soulseek. Now, how many are they going to be willing to fine/send to jail? I think that if people started to distribute Soulseek en masse, then they it might have some impact.
Roze
http://www.10ch.org/
@19 I am on that like a cheap suit. I have plenty of cash floating around since I don’t have the conscience to spend it on what I like to enjoy, media, movies, music, what have you.
I am not sure if this was on torrent freak but I refer to this everytime I hear about the industry whining about losing money. http://www.femalefirst.co.uk/entertainment/Lyle+Lovett-53870.html
I met Lyle a number of times. He is one of the most unselfish artists there are. He played a gig at the wheeler opera house in Aspen, Colorado some years ago. Still does from time to time actually. He was kind of enough to play for free in a cool little local bar called the Howling Wolf(may that place rest in peace) until about 4am. It was one the coolest experiences I have ever had. I will carry it with me forever.
Pay the guy some cash and quit suing the little guys.
D.
Just FYI: If they win their lawsuit, they will request what’s called an exequatur, asking an American court to enforce the French court’s ruling on American soil.
The french… go figure
@1 Should Jan Kneschke be worried? The Pirate Bay, Mininova and isoHunt all use lighttpd. SPPF, SACEM and SCPP don’t like those three. Jan wrote lighttpd. Ergo, he must be equally disliked. The fact that lighttpd is also used to run YouTube and Wikipedia would surely be irrelevant. Just as the Vuze BitTorrent client being used to shift everything from Linux distros to the CC-licensed music on Jamendo to Vuze’s own commercially-licensed content seems to be irrelevant.
Taking the view of the French music industry to its logical conclusion, the DADVSI copyright law should prohibit all software that isn’t completely proprietary and locked down. The French would be left with the likes of Microsoft’s Internet Information Services for serving HTTP and Kontiki for peer-to-peer. Lovely…
http://freeipodsaregreat.blogspot.com/
Niggers.
/lucidvain.co.nr/
FSCKING SACEM ASSH0LES (yes I’m french)
I’ve hanged out on Soulseek for a few years by now, and most of the mixes and tunes I download there are even shared by THE ARTISTS WHO DID THEM, happy themselves to spread their music and get feedback about it !
I’m starting to get really upset about the dumbasses ruling us and those fscking lobbies puppeteering them…
SACEM and SCCP aren’t suing Soulseek because it can be used to share copyrighted work. That’s really just a pretense.
They’re suing Soulseek because it gives independant/unsigned artists a cost-free platform for publishing where said artists are in control and said artists reap the majority of profit, and that scares the recording industry shitless.
The only thing keeping them alive are the naive musicians they hoodwink with lies and handwaving. But things like Soulseek are educating tomorrow’s artists about the actual nature of the RIAA/bigtime record labels as bloodsucking middlemen nobody needs.
This lawsuit, like so many others these dinosars have filed in their vain attempt to keep the future at bay, is destined for failure.
Some one needs to kill these pricks.. I find it so fucked that just a small handfull of people are controlling are culture…. If they ruin Soulseek at all it will be the last straw for me…
I DONT WANT TO LISTEN TO THEIR SHIT MUSIC.. FFS
you guys just blew any chance of me buying a dvd from you any time soon [if ever again]
the whole industrie is filled with retarted incapable people with their minds still in the stoneage.
lobbygroups are mostly lawyers, lawyers are not human, they are…lawyers.
everything they tell is a lie.
GO SOULSEEK!!!!! KILL THEM
to hell with it, SS was the last resort, and seemed like it’s gonna withstand the worst of the lawsuit storms (only cause it’s not that popular ?). SS will live on and if it will be taken down, new, better P2P client will take it’s place. Rip it, share it, buy it only if you wish to join the ebil forces.
Until the people STAND UP, the abuse will never stop. BOYCOTT all music and movie products and the industry WILL get the message VERY quickly!
Jess
http://www.Privacy-Center.net
Its time for the people to stand up. If poeple would STOP buying music and going to and renting movies, it would set them steright real quick!
http://www.anonymity.cz.tc
This is great. I had just assumed that soulseek had died like most of the rest from its time with the advent of torrents. I hope they can win, and it seems as though they’d have the best chance of any if their user base really does have a large amount of artists.
@38
You mean very slowly. How will the industry ever stop these abuses? They will continue to do so as long as the law sanctions it. They will continue to do so as long as they can – the only way to stop them is to remove their ability to do so.
Roze
I must say that I am all for file sharing..
but its amazing how retarded alot of you have become (Especially you Roze)
You think file sharers are going to change big business? Remove there ability to abuse the system?
You have all completely lost it. Only 1 thing matters in this world to them, MONEY. Always has been, always will be. Sure I agree with all your ideas, but actualy changing them legally is out of the question. The only thing that may happen is that piracy becomes so rampant that they actualy have to change by force, and from the looks of there revenue stream, thats not happening any time soon.
Get your head out the clouds, they are stronger then ever, sure they are a dinosaur of an industry, but they arent going anywhere anytime soon.
Just be happy we still have access to free content, and as for people getting sued, all you can do is hide yourself. They have more money then we can dream of, more power then we will ever have, and more corruption we will never know about.
The only difference any one of you will ever make is the more crap you download and the more people to spread it to and teach to do it themselves. So stop bitching on here as if this place makes a difference.
More ridiculous things.
When for-profit labels lose in competition to non-profit labels, it’s clear that business models have to change.
No. Instead, they would rather sue (when they have no claim).
Copyright was made to protect works for the purpose of promoting creativity, innovation, and invention.
Copyright was NOT made to protect your failing business, and attack successful creativity, innovation, and invention.
RICO Class Action Against RIAA In Missouri: http://news.slashdot.org/news/08/11/21/1644213.shtml
The RIAA is a terrorist organization.
Each time that you buy a RIAA album you are supporting terrorism, remember that.
this is great advertising for soulseek. hardly anyone uses it.
Exactly. No one uses it, so it is almost impossible to find some of the rarer stuff.
Why do you guys even bother posting stories about a program maybe 5k people use regularly?
better outlaw radio stations all over the world that play copyrighted music…somebody might have an audiotape and be recording them! *gasps*
money grubbing greedy c*cksuckers.
i just can’t get why industry authorities don’t percieve that the era of selling music is “Over”. They can earn from ads,and set the ppl free…
@42
It is completely incorrect that money is all the power in the world. Sure, money ensures a lot of power, which is why, over the ages, the big lords were able to oppress the peasants so much. However, it is not without historical precedent that the the will of the people have triumphed over the power of money. Take, for example, the progressive era in the U.S.
Roze
they will never understand that the solution is to follow the flow and not trying to swim against it ….
next thing we will know a other nice program will goes out with the exact same purpose ….
a other sword slash in water
a famous canuck said
make mixed music cds
and leave them everywhere
maybe when every park bench has a nice selection of tunes aorund they will get thehint
oh why not drop a few at city hall
and your parliament
time to get the TUNES OUT
/mpaa pres slams fist on table but we pwn the presidency now with biden there, we pwn canada cause we made microsoft our buddy aka bell canada.
why can’t musicians bend over and take it like my wife does
so what happens if soulseek is in country X, and they get sued in france…? are they going to send french cops to country X, or ask for extradition? wtf. it just doesn’t make any sense, if anything, don’t allow for downloads to france from the soulseek site, but this won’t stop french users from getting the soulseek client, are they stupid?
These music companies make many millions of dollars off of people buying records. However, for them that is not enough. As long as there is one person out there DLing something and, in their eyes, “stealing” from them then then they will go after whoever they can. They are money grubbing _______!!
FRENCH FUCKING TWATS
How promising! Perhaps soon they will shut every way of getting educated in new music, and we will unanimously buy only what major tv networks advertise. Superb, no?
Sarcasm, aside, SoulSeek helped me discover sub genres that were never available in my country, and loads of Japanese artists, that were not available anywhere in Europe.
Due to SoulSeek and a couple other communities we have educated the ones interested and now we are supporting artists that we would have never heard of, other wise.
Saying p2p hurts sales, is a freaking oxymoron. Please stop suing innocents chaps, they need the money to support you, idiotic music industry!
I have used soulseek in the past. all i can say is that soulseek is an awesome alternative to limewire. The downloads are fast, and the application is very light and simple. I vote for a victory (hopefully) to soulseek.
DOWN WITH THE MAFIAA
that is very shitty cuz whne you see the price there in france !! like 20/25 € a fucking CD ! last time i seen vader for 34€ ill still remember lol I buy many cds myself. !!!!! fnac knows me well. but i refuse to buy shits too! and still many things i cant find in the cd-stores!and thats not normal!!! THAT REALLY PISS ME OFF!!!!! they better work on this first instead of attacking those!!! SERIOUSLY !! IM TIRED WHEN I THINK THAT I HAVE THE MONEY BUT I CANT BUY WHAT I WANT CUZ THEY CANT GET IT NOR IN IMPORT !!!! and then if the whole population downloads thats in own fault? LET ME LAUGH !!!! shitty…
those wars are illarious and shits.
Nov 20, 2008 at 23:08 by http://www.eZee.se
Dumb fu*ks trying to stifle innovation via threats and industry lobbied laws rather than adapt.
The only ones who are going to make a killing on this are the lawyers, the industry is too dumb to see this is going to fail… but everyone else sees the writing clearly on the wall.
F-A-I-L.
i use slsk to promote my music
ive also had illegal copies of my own releases appear on slsk but do u hear me complaining?
music industry nazi lawyer takeover
god damnit piss off somewhere else n make some money without suing perfectly useful software companies
numptys
not soulseek! I don’t understand this, who gives a shet with what a smelly french court thinks.
well said mate who gives a fuck what the french frogs say soulseek is one of the best p2p programs about the french want tae get a fuckin grip
In ANY case Music should be an UNIVERSAL holding as patrimonio del humanidad ….
A french adv for LEGAL music distribution indicates than more than a BILLION of piracy files are exchanged every year… SO a billion of judiciary cases ???
seems they finally closed it?
soulseek server is down for several hours now. any news on this ?
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