Seeqpod Gets Sued: I knew this was coming
Seeqpod is a music search engine that crawls the web and finds music files. I have used it a few times recently and was pleasantly surprised with the results. Many of the songs that I was looking for were found. Full DRM-free mp3s. Where does Seeqpod find these files? From what’s often called “open directories”. Open directories are typically user directories on web servers that have inadvertently been made public. They often aren’t publicly available for long since once they are found, they are leeched like crazy by users, which drives up bandwidth usage on the user account (which eventually leads to the account being suspended).
Savvy users have been finding open directories for years. With the right search parameters, Google is a great tool for finding such open directories. However, Seeqpod is an ideal tool for this. Not only is it laser focused on finding music, it mashes up relevant discography data and can even stream the search results so you can listen before you download.
The problem is that Seeqpod is essentially a Napster for the Web. Whereas the real Napster searched people’s own local computers for music, Seeqpod searches the Web for music that people have uploaded to servers. While there may be some legitimate content that Seeqpod is crawling, I think it will be very difficult for the Company to defent itself against a new lawsuit from Warner Music which claims that Seeqpod directly contributes to copyright infringement by helping people locate pirated content.
As usual, I think the record labels are picking the wrong battles and need to focus their resources on figuring out how they can add value, and build closer relationships, with music listeners. The recent developments at Last.FM makes me hopeful that the record labels are in fact seeing the light.
