The UI bit is a red herring. The question is the developers' motivation and what actions they encourage a user to take. Design of the UI may be one piece of evidence of that motivation among others.
Even if you can show the intention of the developer was to aid the user in taking a certain action, if that action can be legal in some cases, how can that be held against the developer?
Is a gun scope illegal because it helps a shooter hit their targets where sometimes shooting those targets is an illegal action? Should torrenting be banned because it is often used to transfer illegal files even though there are a lot of legal files in use as well?
The beauty of law being a human institution is you get to look past such fig leaves. Here, the fact that the author billed SeeqPod as a "streaming music startup" tells you all you need to know about whether his service just incidentally facilitated copyright infringement, or was designed to profit from its users' copyright infringement on a mass scale.
I don't think "streaming music startup" implies copyright infringement. There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright.
I think this situation might be similar to google/images rather than youtube as others have suggested. Google certainly indexes tons of images which infringe on someone's copyright. Furthermore you can view them directly in google/images.
> There are certainly mp3s on websites that are not infringing on any copyright.
When you bill your service as a "streaming music service" 99.5% of your users will use it to listen to Taylor Swift, and by billing it as such single apparent inference is that you intend for them to do that. The non-infringing uses are just a fig leaf--something you point to trying to cover up the obvious.
Google Image search is different. People don't primarily use GIS to find images that are hosted on the internet without the copyright owner's permission, nor does Google do anything to market to that use.
> Google Image search is different. People don't primarily use GIS to find images that are hosted on the internet without the copyright owner's permission, nor does Google do anything to market to that use.
I agree with your general interpretation of the case here, but I wouldn't be surprised if the primary use case of GIS actually is copyright infringement: finding images to paste into your Web site, PowerPoint presentation, Word document, or what have you. Google is, interestingly enough, rather silent about what GIS is actually for.
Related is YouTube, which even post-lawsuit-and-Content-ID gets a huge amount of use for music piracy. But it's probably easier for them to argue post-Content-ID that they've done a lot to actively discourage that use.
And notably Google did face the billion dollar lawsuit with Viacom vs YouTube and had to fight for survival under DMCA. The key argument is "knowledge" of copyright material being improperly hosted, the same standard in theory being applied to all these services from Napster to YouTube to Mega.
Good to know that all streaming music is copyrighted and there is no legal music one can stream. Except that isn't the case, and so it goes back to my point. Perhaps he actually meant for it to be used by people streaming all the free, legal, and often hard to find mp3s out there. You can go to OCRemix for a lot of free music, but searching through all the musicians who put out their own song on their own website isn't at all simple without a tool like this.
Compare it to Tor. Lots of legal uses (at least legal in the US, maybe not in the country where one would need something like Tor for said uses). But the majority of its use is for a few illegal activities. Are we to judge intent based off of how the majority of uses use it? Good bye torrenting.
