Be careful what you put in an email

https://om.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/be-careful-what-you-put-in-an-email/

by kunle • 15 years ago

139 70 15 years ago

om.wordpress.com

nohat• 15 years ago

That seems almost intentionally damning. Why would he put that in writing? This is disappointing because I really like grooveshark's service.

a3camero• 15 years ago

Things tend to look like that when you take the most damning possible statement out of tens of thousands of documents that you received in discovery!

refurb• 15 years ago

That's the problem. When these statements come up in court documents, they are never put in context. You're just left up on the stand mumbling about how everyone else is misinterpreting your words.

adgar4• 15 years ago

That's because people don't usually go out of their way to produce damning evidence. Damning evidence is an accident, that's why you don't find much of it, even among "tens of thousands of documents." Which is why careful scrutiny of discovery documents is important in any legal case.

drivingmenuts• 15 years ago

Seems to me that behaving ethically would solve a lot of problems (or at least not cause them in the first place).

This guy pretty much just wrote the lawsuit for his opposition.

maeon3• 15 years ago

Just a reminder that emails are public, everyone you dont want reading them will see it. Unless you are the government with the torture emails which were accidentally deleted.

huckfinnaafb• 15 years ago

Can anyone explain exactly why this is sinister? If the label is aware of the price they're selling the license at and buying the data, where is the unfair deception?

nathanb2• 15 years ago

The second paragraph, if I'm reading it correctly, details how they don't report streaming data to the labels until they have enough data to guarantee that they can charge labels more than the cost of streaming the songs. I imagine the labels don't particularly care for this behavior, and history (specifically Grooveshark's history) seems to have borne this out.

tantalor5• 15 years ago

> they don't report streaming data

What do you mean? How did you arrive at this conclusion?

Whether they are obligated to "report streaming data" is up to their contract, not ethics.

hapless2• 15 years ago

They weren't licensing anything. They were relying on DMCA safe harbor provisions to protect them from infringement suits. The problem is that the executive e-mail indicates plain as day that they were ineligible for that safe harbor in at least two ways: they knew of and were profiting from infringement.

Who could have guessed that basing a business on copyright infringement might get you sued for copyright infringement?

tantalor5• 15 years ago

The email says "we use the label’s songs", "the data we got from them", "we pay them".

This suggests they were getting the label's data from the label and paying the label.

That seems like a license to me.

nathanb2• 15 years ago

I would argue "be careful whom you send emails to" as well. While drivingmenuts' comment about behaving ethically might apply in this case, sometimes you might think you're behaving ethically and it's only later than you realize that, while operating in good faith, you inadvertently broke some law (patents and copyrights are a minefield).

I prefer not to correspond with the type of person who would take advantage of this by releasing or publishing my emails. Sometimes it's unavoidable, but less often than you might think.

aidenn0• 15 years ago

Do you delete all your e-mails or do you leave your work e-mails on your work machine? If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company. An e-mail that goes out to more than one person is virtually guaranteed to be around years later where it might haunt you.

dctoedt• 15 years ago

> If you don't delete them, then your e-mail archives could be used against your company.

Unfortunately, the flip side might be as bad or worse: If you deleted emails or other potentially-relevant documents at a time when a lawsuit was reasonably foreseeable, then you could be hit with an adverse inference [1]. That is, the judge might conclusively presume (or instruct the jury to conclusively presume) that the missing emails or documents must have been really bad, otherwise you wouldn't have destroyed them.

And if government authorities were involved, then you could be indicted on criminal charges of obstruction of justice. (That ultimately destroyed accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP [2].)

That's why opposing counsel can get downright orgasmic when their adversary has deleted emails or destroyed documents, and when this can be "spun" as having been motivated by a desire to conceal harmful evidence.

I used to think it made sense to adopt, and then follow, a comprehensive "document retention" [sic] policy, where documents are reviewed every X months for possible destruction. In the real world, though, people get busy, and they don't take the time to do periodic document reviews. Then, suddenly, a lawsuit is imminent, and people realize they still have all these documents that should have been routinely destroyed but never were. So they try to play catch-up with a shredding party. The belatedly-destroyed documents might be utterly harmless, but that might not matter. (A belated shredding party is what got Arthur Andersen indicted.)

RULES OF THUMB: If your organization doesn't already have a document-retention policy, here are two serviceable rules of thumb that might help (YMMV, I'm not your lawyer, etc.):

A) Keep emails and other documents for as long as you think you'll have a business need for them -- and keep in mind that sometimes the law mandates specific retention periods for certain categories of document;

B) If there's a non-trivial possibility of a lawsuit that would be even remotely related to the subject matter of the emails or other documents, then don't destroy them without first checking with your lawyer. As the saying goes, sometimes the cover-up --- whether real, or simply the product of opposing counsel's "spin" --- is worse than the crime.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_inference

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Andersen

dotBen• 15 years ago

It's pretty standard for CEOs and executives of publicly traded companies to delete all email -- not just locally, but ensure their entire email system, backups, etc are set to expunge an email entirely from the system as soon as they delete it.

Mainly for this reason.

Case in point: Eric Scmidt http://gawker.com/5505606/gmail-overlord-always-deletes-his-...

ams6110• 15 years ago

I worked at an investment banking company in the 1990s. They did not have email when I started, but when they adopted Exchange and everyone got a Windows PC and MS Office, the CIO set a policy that emails would be retained for 6 months, then purged. I don't know if this would fly today, but I think the fact that it was a blanket policy and not based on the content of the messages made it OK at least at that time.

willyt• 15 years ago

What if you deleted the email you sent saying "Please ensure the crane you are using is rated for that load" and you need it when you get prosecuted by health and safety for the horrible accident that just happened.

EDIT: Or the email saying "Yes you can carry out the work in the manner you proposed but only if it will be at no extra cost to my client and you take full responsibility for the alteration to the original design"

travem• 15 years ago

Whether or not you trust the person is irrelevant, if it's not privileged information (i.e. to your lawyer + some other definitions) it could always be found later on during discovery.

Tangurena• 15 years ago

I prefer to walk down the hall and chat with the other person. Humor and sarcasm don't translate well to email, and I've managed to personally offend people without realizing it. By taking the time to actually look them in the eye (and wink, as needed), I find it clears a lot of things up. Now if the email is a purely technical issue, an email is usually the best solution.

ChuckMcM• 15 years ago

Who you send them too, other than your lawyer doesn't protect them from discovery. See Jwz's rant on the badattitude list [1] about lawyers and discovery and companies having to pay after the fact. Talking to people face to face is good, both from a legal protection standpoint and from a relationship building standpoint.

[1] http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

cageface• 15 years ago

Exactly. I tend to assume that any email I write might eventually wind up permanently plastered on the net somewhere. Face-to-conversation is not only safer but a lot more satisfying.

Nick_C• 15 years ago

> releasing or publishing my emails

Has the copyright issue on emails been decided yet (and I missed it)? I thought you retain copyright on your emails and the recipient can't just release or publish them willy-nilly.

tompagenet2• 15 years ago

Off topic, but why does the text on this website look so awful in Chrome 15 in Win7 64? There are actually gaps in the letters. It looks awful in a different way in Firefox 8 - clumpy letters with awkwardly variable line width.

Update to clarify that it's the text that looks weird

sp332• 15 years ago

I think the hinting on this font is broken in Chrome for some reason.

benhoyt• 15 years ago

Yeah, those are terrible letter shapes. It happens in IE8 on Windows XP for me too.

DevX101• 15 years ago

How did Universal get GrooveShark's internal emails?

jamesaguilar• 15 years ago

Presumably they were given access to them during discovery for the lawsuit, per standard practice.

goodspeller• 15 years ago

what a disgrase! can't even spell "quiet"!

shill• 15 years ago

The 'e' in email is short for 'evidence'. Little known fact.

DrJokepu• 15 years ago

This wasn't really a secret, many people in the phonographic industry (including some at the record labels themselves) knew or suspected for quite a while that Grooveshark's business plan was something like this.

code_duck• 15 years ago

This seems to be more about Groovesharks' business model than emails.

They appear to be respectable businesses, and have mounted a successful propaganda campaign regarding paying them for music, but let's not shed a tear for the major labels. They steal far, far more from musicians than 'piracy' ever has. Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts. Every major label has failed to pay up to hundreds of millions owed for radio plays and licensing, from all levels of musicians. All in all, they're about as respectable and deserving as your average street pimp. Good for Grooveshark. Someone needs to shake up that industry.

paulhauggis• 15 years ago

"Even beyond the way they rope musicians into highly unfavorable contracts, they often don't even fulfill the contracts."

VC firms do the same thing. So why are they so respected on HN?

psychotik• 15 years ago

The artist-label relationship is similar to entrepreneur-VC relationship in more than just this one regard. Angels/incubators are like indie labels, and the relationship there is slightly less skewed, but most parallels still exist.

billpatrianakos3• 15 years ago

They're respected for the same reason bands respect labels. It's because often times the only way to make it big, really big, is to be a sellout and get in bed with a label/VC. Businesses need funding like bands and supporting yourself is a bitch so why not sell out and get a free ride?

So we read up on business news and learn how the VCs think so that one day a few of us will get "signed" and hopefully make it big. We all know it can be a kind of predatory relationship but at the same time entrepreneurs are all about taking that one big risk that pays off in the end. So startups, like bands, try to get VC backing in the hope that they won't become yet another company that was chewed up and spit by the VCs and instead becomes the next Google/Facebook/CoolestCompanyEverCo.

So are they really respected? Kinda. Depends who you are. Much of that perceived respect is akin to research so we can get in bed with them. Kind of like books on how to easily bed women except we read it right from the horse's mouth.

__abc• 15 years ago

Beware what you put in any medium that can be retransmitted without your permissions :)

feralchimp• 15 years ago

"Rude reminder that one needs to be very careful when sending emails"...when one is a shady-ass character up to some shady-ass shit.

This is less of a business plan than it is a hedge fund betting on one side of a race condition. The bet is that user growth will outpace successful litigation against the investment.

It would be less ethically problematic if they were doing the piracy themselves instead of croudsourcing it.

billpatrianakos3• 15 years ago

What a dumb move. I'm really interested to know who the recipient was. This isn't about watching what you write more so than just being judicious about what information you choose to share and with whom you share it.

That segment of email made the email's author sound condescending and made the business itself look shady. I personally don't see any problem with that business model at all but there will be people who read it in a condescending tone.

One last thing, the spelling. How in the world does anyone who wants to be taken seriously get away with that sort of spelling? Especially if you're running a business. Slang and shorthand are for teenage texts, not emails from high level execs. I'm a high level executive myself. I'm the CEO/Founder/President of my $20k/yr business that has its office based in my living room and even I wouldn't let that happen in an email from me or anyone representing the work I do. The way you speak and write reflects on you in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a hillbilly.

ricardobeat5• 15 years ago

I'm usually one to wince upon these mistakes, but for all I know a Nobel Prize winner could be a hillbilly. Some people like to use their time to get things done instead of worrying about grammar. It takes some time to accept that.

darklajid• 15 years ago

Spelling: I for one couldn't parse it. I stumbled a handful of times and just stopped reading, looked at the comments here instead.

Looked like a kid texting to me.

billpatrianakos3• 15 years ago

Thank you. I think people are dissecting my comment a bit much like they have an axe to grind. Someone mentioned getting things done over checking spelling. Please. Does it take that long to type an extra character or two. That's a bullshit argument. Then dyslexia? Well that's fine but dyslexia doesn't cause you to spell "because" as "cuz" so while I feel for dyslexics, that too is just not good enough. The remark about "oh what if the Nobel Prize winner was a Russiin chemist?"... Oh, come on with that. It's obvious what I mean. The point is that this type of spelling can make the smartest of us and those of us worthy of a lot of respect look like fools. People will write you off for it. Suppose this were written by Steve Forbes or Bill Gates or PG himself but we didn't know it. I'm willing to bet that if the recipient wasn't a close friend and didn't recognize the sender's address that they wouldn't be taken seriously. That's my point.

I think you get it darklajid. When someone writes this way it just reflects poorly on the person. My point was that people don't take you seriously even if you really are a genius that can help them if you write and speak in a manner like we see in this email. It it's a close friend then maybe it's fine but my overall point still stands despite the nit picking.

DanBC• 15 years ago

> The way you speak and write reflects on you in more ways than people realize. It can make a Nobel Prize winner look like a hillbilly.

Dyslexia can make spelling errors such as "quite" instead of "quiet" tricky to spot. I'm not aware of any software that's targets this type of heterograph / homophone errors.

Some software autocorrect is notoriously annoying.

People emailing close friends, where there's no expectation of wider distribution, are often less formal than they would be in other situations.

And why would a Nobel prize winner be any good at English spelling and grammar? I expect Russian chemists to be great at chemistry, and let the editors worry about the stylistic stuff.

RyanMcGreal• 15 years ago

> Let’s keep this quite for as long as we can.

Clearly the lesson here is that you need to spellcheck carefully before sending out your emails.

Be careful what you put in an email

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