Friday, February 20, 2009

Last.fm turning over user information to RIAA?

Thanks to Fred for letting me know about this report from TechCrunch that Last.fm may have turned over user data to the RIAA.

Commentary & discussion:

p2pnet.net




Keywords: lawyer digital copyright law online internet law legal download upload peer to peer p2p file sharing filesharing music movies indie independent label freeculture creative commons pop/rock artists riaa independent mp3 cd favorite songs intellectual property portable music player

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

From the article: Unfortunately, it’s come down to this: you really shouldn’t share any data on the Web you wouldn’t feel comfortable seeing in a court of law.

Pretty much says it all right there. Personally, I don't use any online services such as last.fm or Facebook ... I simply do not trust where any information I provide will end up. It's bad enough that I'm subject to all forms of "targeted advertising", generated from what little information I've given out over the years. I see no reason to make it easy for such data aggregators to screw me over.

Anonymous said...

In the comments on that article, people claiming to be last.fm staff are denying any such thing ever happened or would ever happen; apparently TechCrunch decided to print an unsubstantiated rumor from an anonymous FOAF without checking their facts first.

Bybyk said...

Thanks for interesting information.

I dont won't own account on last.fm...

Anonymous said...

Anonymous 11:06:00:

The last.fm staff would probably lie about it if they had given the data over, so don't be so certain...

- Frank -

Bybyk said...

Maybe.
But I have little plugin Fire.fm for Firefox )

Alter_Fritz said...

well, if RIAA (as alleged) says "No, comment" instead of a categorical "No, we have not received any data like email- or IP addresses from last.fm", the denial of this developer Russ(*) is In my opinion not too convincing.

It could very well boil down to semantics.
Google for example does not consider IP addresses "personal identifiable information". And email adresses can of course be used by more then one personly identifiable person.

Given these nitpicking facts, an admitting by this developer that "we'd never personally identify our users to a third party" might not be what anybody else not working with/for them would interpret in these words given that they "work with the major labels and provide them with broad statistics, as we would with any other label".

Do they have a legally enforceable statement somewhere prominently on their page where they exactly point out what last.fm's understanding of the term "broad statistics" is and what datafields those contain?

(*) http://www.lastfm.de/forum/21713/_/506518/_/8660996

Alter_Fritz said...

Hmm, probably just some innocent coincident that last.fm updated their privacy policy less then 2 weeks ago while the terms of service where last updated in november last year


"Updated on: February 11, 2009"
http://www.last.fm/legal/privacy

"Updated on: November 21, 2008"
http://www.last.fm/legal/terms


Might be nice to read what the prior "privacy" version was.