SeeqPod

» see seeqpod.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

seeqpod's peak years overlap with my mp3 download era, but the name never came up on the turkish forums i was reading. by 2007 or 2008 my music habit was still built out of donanimhaber threads and later soulseek clients. seeqpod's shape was closer to google for playable files. i saw the name a couple of times in tech-blog roundups but never actually made it my search bar.

the site launched in july 2005 out of emeryville california, built by kasian franks with rafal podowski and shekhar lodha. the founding pitch was a smarter media search engine, one that could find playable audio and video that already existed somewhere on the web and index it by artist and title. the crawler pulled links to mp3s and video files hosted on random third party servers. seeqpod itself hosted nothing.

the audience it attracted was mostly college kids with a fast connection and a taste for songs that were hard to find on itunes. by 2008 the traffic sat around forty five million monthly unique visitors, which is real scale for what looked from the outside like a metasearch tool with a small player embedded on the page. seeqpod added a mobile player and a myspace widget along the way, both of which pulled more traffic in and made the labels look at it harder.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

warner music group sued seeqpod first in january 2008 in new york federal court. emi and capitol followed with a similar filing later that year. the theory was that a search engine indexing tracks could be a form of contributory copyright infringement, even if the tracks lived on servers seeqpod did not own or control. this was a novel legal argument at the time. before seeqpod the closest analog was napster, but napster indexed files on its own users' machines. seeqpod indexed the whole open web.

the emi and capitol suits got dismissed on procedural grounds later that year. the warner suit did not. legal fees ate whatever runway seeqpod had raised. the company had also expanded internationally on the idea that the us copyright fight might not follow it to europe or asia, which turned out to be optimistic. by early 2009 the founders were out of money and out of legal options.

~ the day it died ~

seeqpod filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on april 1, 2009, which is an unfortunate date for a company that was not joking. the consumer site limped along for a few weeks then went dark. the underlying search patents and technology were auctioned in a chapter 7 conversion the following year. intertrust technologies bought the ip in august 2010 for what was reported as a low seven-figure number. the seeqpod brand did not carry forward.

the important footnote is that seeqpod was the first case where a search engine got sued for simply finding and pointing at media that existed on other people's servers. that argument mostly did not hold up in later litigation, and the music industry moved on to going after cyberlockers and torrent trackers. still, the legal theory chilled the whole category of playable-media search. nothing quite like seeqpod launched again after 2010.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »