EMI’s Outrageous Lawsuit Against Developer Takes Its Toll
Last month I wrote about a lawsuit filed by major record label EMI against Seeqpod, the questionably-legal free streaming music site. The suit isn't Seeqpod's first (Warner sued them last year), but it is notable for taking the music industry's war against the web to a new low. Beyond naming a number of Seeqpod executives as part of the suit, EMI also decided to sue a hapless third party developer named Ryan Sit, who happened to use the Seeqpod API in one of his projects. Now Sit is being forced to shut down one of his projects - a lifestreaming service dubbed Swurl that launched last summer.
I'll leave the legality of Seeqpod for the courts to decide (the site doesn't actually host any music files - it finds them scattered on pages across the web and streams them into its media player). But as I wrote last month, its case against Ryan Sit is ridiculous. Sit is a prolific developer who uses many APIs from different web services, and used Seeqpod's API just as dozens of similar sites have before him. Suing him sets a precedent that could make developers weary of using any API, for fear that the service they're tapping into could be doing something potentially illegal.
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