Another clincher is the fact that Guruji advertised this as a specific feature. It did not say that users can search for songs – it clearly said, 'free mp3 songs'! I wrote about it and was worried about it, back then! http://itwofs.com/beastoftraal/2008/12/18/downloa…

Seems all the swami and guruji types entity are in trouble be it Offline or Online.Guruji Board members should also be brought to books! I guess this was the reason why their angel investor got his name struck off from the guruji website.

If they would let people listen alone and place an option to buy the track it would have been okay. But since they let people download most of the tracks, I knew they had it coming.

hey…if Guruji is infringing copyright in that case google can be sued over many things…. A serach engine is a platform to search anyhting and how can it assure you that you get redirected to a page which is not copyrighted. I find it really strange.. can't believe this

hey mahesh! under a garb of search engine if a website is selectively sourcing copyright works (ringtones and songs in this case) from pirate/unlicensed sites, then they should be ready to face consequences when such copyright owner decides enough is enough! Arresting someone is a prerogative of police to secure evidence and participate of accused, it may sound a bit harsh in this case, but one can very well imagine it to be necessary in such cases where evidence can be tampered with irreparably.

Guruji has very unique concept.

1. Link to all sites which give pirated music.
2. Dont show sites which don't give free music.

When people are searching for a song they know guruji is search engine where they can get pirated music.

Search for a song get link from pirated music.

Google doesn't discriminate over website or give priority to piracy supported websites.

Guruji even contacts music related websites which are ranking good and gives them this piracy search engine.

@Nikhil – "Was Guruji in the know of, and abetting copyright violation? We don't know."

The answer is categorically YES. To confirm this please do the following. Will take 5 minutes no more.

1. Install Firebug (a Firefox plugin) and goto Songs.pk. As the page loads you will notice ads from guruji.com showing up in your firebug report.
2. Search for 3 idiots or any other movie title on Songs.pk. You'll immediately see either the search is powered by Guruji.com OR a cobranded site.
3. Goto Guruji.com and try to sign up as a "Publisher" in the Advertising section. Once you fill in your contact info all you get is a msg informing you to wait. Later a Guruji sales rep calls or emails you personally. Try it…

The last action clearly establishes a direct, personal contact between Guruji.com and songs.pk. So guruji cannot hide behind the "i dont know them. i just crawled them" argument. The only argument they did have was that "Oh, I didnt know they are pirates". That charade ended the minute TSeries, Saregama and other labels informed them as much. Acting ignorant after that was brazenly unethical and a dumb move on their mgmt team's part. Shame on Anurag and a cheer for the media labels..

I think this might get settled out of court.

This is an intricate issue and further complicated by vague laws and interpretations.

But one thing,,,why is this story titled " Sequoia funded …." . Makes it more eye catching ???

Even I noticed this … The headline is shockingly crafted with deliberate mal intent in such a way as to read a Sequoia Exec got arrested. Shameful journalism. Deliberate intent to harm Sequoia brand by Medianama team. I hope ALL VC firms / Investment companies/ Banks in India see this work by Medianama and take action by blacklisting such malicious site owners/ partners from getting ANY funding in India & abroad. This kind of ugly journalism usually found in TV news nowdays.

Sequoia executives themselves have been aware of Guruji's illegal and unethical practices for a while now. They have been copied on various correspondence by IMI, TSeries, IPRS and several other agencies across the country. So lets not worship them here. Sequoia USA would NEVER dare to invest in such a portfolio in the West.

yes ofcourse downloading songs without rights is a violation,,,

no deliberate mal-intent, and nowhere have we suggested that anyone from sequoia was arrested. the sequoia attribution indicates that this is a firm with solid and sound backing, which why it is worth noting that such a thing has happened.

secondly, no where have we said that guruji execs should have been arrested, or are guilty of copyright violation.

thirdly, we've put forth the T-Series argument, and *presented the counter argument*.

at the end, we've highlighted the importance of this case.

finally, about your point about VC, banks and investment firms blacklisting MediaNama from funding – that doesn't have, and will never have bearing on our content.

Do you think investment decisions in India don't get whetted by the folks in US. That would be hard to believe, its justs that the folks in US are also little more lax when it comes to things in India. After all everybody knows how things happen here

Google serves ads and helps almost all the sites with pirated content. Google also supports fraudsters with a credit card to serve ads and loots people's money. So lets not try and place a hallow on google's head here.

Poor Guruji guys had the pressure to sustain their business through one sustainable trick, after realising that there is no space for a "desi google" and they've tried the music trick to survive. Only someone who runs an Internet business in a stupid Indian online business ecosystem that consists Digital Agencies with zero understanding about the internet space and Corporate Online Marketing Managers with lesser IQ than my 9 year old son, will understand the huge pressure of sustaining a business. My sympathies to Guruji guys. Hope they come out clean.
We seem to have an organisation called IAMAI which is supposed to save the Internet Business in India and am sure they must be busy planning their next retarded conference, not bothering what happens to their members!!

The arrest of Guruji.com executives and the question of piracy is very dicey. Especially, when there are only a few legal precedents in India. From what I hear, everyone is naked in the hamam of music industry. Imao, the record companies are not so innocent either. Read how onhttp://bit.ly/aXHnF0

Google never lets you "download free mp3" right from its site. Taking the user to the specific site mite be okay, but guruji.com has even tied up with some shady websites and added the download option right in their site. Please dont compare Guruji to a search engine. IT isn't, it never was!

I dont think Guruji was running this scam "Music Search" service when the investment itself was made. So I'm not sure Sequoia's US counterparts are aware of their practices. Its not obvious anyways. But if they are "a little more lax when it comes to things in India", that is in fact inexplicable and we should not accept or pardon that behaviour. I dont care how big a fund it is.

After arrest Guruji.com has stopped showing ads which says "ads by guruji". I tried testing songs.pk after installing firebug.

Citing from your previous comment"Sequoia USA would NEVER dare to invest in such a portfolio in the West." and "I dont think Guruji was running this scam "Music Search" service when the investment itself was made"

So effectively Sequoia India made this investment much before this thing started off. The question here is whether they were aware of the offerings or the repercussions of it. And did they intentionally turn a blind eye to it

Please try searching for songs on guruji and observe properly. Guruji only provides link to the page where you can download the song.

The difference between searching for music on google and on guruji is only one thing: Guruji has a clean interface and naive users can search/download/listen songs easily. If you are a power user and used to exploring internet, you can always download these songs by searching on google. So will you sue google?

http://www.guruji.com/music/raavan%20song%20beera/?f=mp3&src2=

The links open as music.guruji.com , I can download without havin to go to the "illegal" site at all! BTW, Google is way above the league and they arent into crappy stuff. Comparing the two is insane!

I am very curious about this issue where the legal-line is not drawn yet.

On google I can download the same mp3 songs in 3 steps, on guruji i can download in 2 steps due to its better interface. is the better interface of guruji the issue?

how about google image search? Many of the site in the results don't own rights for the images they are showing.

My point is, there is no clear line drawn in IT policies till now. Let us see how it unfolds.

My sympathy to Guruji guys. Despite all the talk of IT development in India, Indian ecosystem is still so very police and legal oriented with no understanding about internet space. The arrest is to give it a criminal air and make people go away from guruji.com web site. In India it is very easy to set up arrests like this if the people are influential. Anything can be alleged, copyright, defamation etc as convenient. Was this arrest needed ? Indian culture is to conveniently use police to do all the dirty work. After hitting hard on the person, T Series will probably send in lawyers. This is similar to another arrest http://ow.ly/1G2mO the news report itself tells me it is an extremely fishy story but I dont see any media investigating the behind the scene actors. We have our police eager to please the money bags, and media which turns a blind eye. It is a lethal combination which will kill the digital space and ecosystem in India.

I completely agree with you, there's a thin line to this.

As far as image searches on google go, Google bot would not crawl your site if you ask it not to (in robots.txt you can specify pages not to be crawled). More than Google displaying the images, the site owners themselves want the images to be displayed as it is a huge source of traffic for them :)

I personally would always be against sites that foster illegal downloads. It's music now, won;t be late before movie download links are displayed as well. I guess Napster suffered a similar fate some time back. So did PirateBay. It'll be interesting to see how the Indian laws are put into force in this one.

First of all serious congrats to T-series. GURUJI was clearly hiding behind the search engine alibi.

Anyone who is abetting or massaging data to manipulate search engine results is guilty even if its GOOGLE.

GURUJI can get away with search engine logic, but how can they provide ads to a illegal website when content is clearly owned by 100 other labels.

Strange irony is that nokia music ads (Which is legal option of owning music with their CWM platform) also used to heavily advertise there. how ignorant were they to be present here. Likewise other telco’s like IDEA etc.

I wish all above comment making intellectuals who are favouring guruji.com were running a P&L account for music labels before understanding perils of search engine’s manipulated traffic diversion.

Kill ‘em all.

"Seems all the swami and guruji types entity are in trouble"

ROTFL..

I am not ruling out the purported "nexus" between Guruji and Songs.pk. But I find this pretty unfortunate. All that can be downloaded from Guruji can be done via Google as well. The only thing is that you require a lot more savviness in elaborating on the file type, etc. Guruji may have made the process simpler and may have positioned themselves as a platform where you can easily find copyrighted material. But this is no way any means to establish that they have violated laws themselves..

And arrest – The only thing they have is an allegation..Raiding is alright..But arrest? Where is a criminality established..Nice way to dance to the bigwig tunes..

When Avnish Bajaj was unfairly arrested Ebay sent in its best lawyers from within India and the US to defend him. The industry also rallied behind the Bazee team, because it was clear that he had nothing to do with the MMS sex CD being posted on ebay, and had proactively worked to remove it immediately too. Sequoia and the other Guruji investors are silent because they know Guruji has manually edited the song listings and directly monetized Songs.pk content. If there was even an iota of doubt regd this matter, Sequoia would have put all its multi-billion dollar clout behind its portfolio company and its executives…Their silence speaks a millions words here…

that's a fallacious reasoning: you don't know whether Sequoia has put their support behind Guruji or not. There's no clear proof of whether Guruji has directly monetized Songs.pk content.

I can accept the argument that there may be indirect monetization, but without proof, one cant say there is direct monetization.

Secondly, how is what Guruji doing any different from what meta search engines do?

2 parts to this story

1)Guruji association with Songs.pk
Guruji has a service called as AdGuru which helps website owners monetize their traffic. So if you own a website you can register with Ad Guru as a publisher, you would be provided with ads for your website. These ads would read “Ads by Guruji.com”. This is the association that Guruji has with songs.pk or any website for that matter. I don’t think it is illegal to provide advertising services and give 90% of the revenue back to the publisher.

2)Playing music on one’s portal
One cannot play copyrighted music on one’s portal. This means if I were to play audio on my portal, I would need to either take a PPL or a YRF license or a T-Series license. But there is nothing that can stop me from providing information. If I have a Google search bar installed on my portal and a user searches for “Mechanisms of self destruction” will I be held responsible for it?

Cutting the long story short, I feel it is only a mechanism of doing business for content which otherwise is not sellable. No one will pay for listening to music.

Karma strikes back. It will be interesting to find out HOW many tamil songs from Ilayaraja & Rahman, which T-Series has copied into hindi without paying 1Re to the producers & music directors. Ex: Kadhalan's song 'Muqabla' was copied by 7 different hindi movies. Tseries accusing Guruji is like pot calling kettle black.

>> No one will pay for listening to music.

Thats a nice point. I think, eventually industry will come up with some other business model

Why a case is filed on search engine instead of on actual illegal content providers? Think about this, filing a case on pirated content provider is much stronger. Accusing a search engine is very weak case.

This case is pretty similar to image search case, and judgement was given in favor of search engine back then.

Another thing: Its a very delicate issue, we shouldn't be judgmental without understanding every small detail here.

Agree 100 %, our label sent letters to Sequoia's office on Menlo Park, they ignored us !!

I agree with this post 100%. I represent a label, and I presonally informed via email and phone to Guruji's management about this infringement and they ignored all the requests. They fund Songs.pk via publisher revenue checks, basically Songs.pk is a sham front of Guruji.com (might be one of their friends site, who gets paid to maintain it, so Guruji can operate their download business behind this sham). Guruji even spammed my email address with their promotion to download songs on their site and win a car for free !! Can you imagine the arrogance? They deserve punishment to the fullest extent of law.

I agree with Nikhil, he is a GREAT guy, I met him many times in Delhi. VCs know what is going on, they dont have to judge by reading such headlines. Yes Sequoia is at fault, they should know what their project managers are upto.

When I searched for songs I got results from various sites, not just songs.pk …

But why don't they file a case on songs.pk? That would be a strong case, and they can win easily. Filing a case on search engine is a very weak case, in my opinion. Music search case is pretty similar to image search case, and in the case of image search law suite the judgement was given in favor of search engine.

Project managers at Sequoia ????

on a related note this is a good readhttp://business.in.com/article/changing-lanes/the…

This is preposterous. Guruji has not sold music directly. Their search results show content from other sites just like in Google. Instead of catching the real culprits, its easy way out to punish a Search Engine

will piracy decrease after closing of guruji?

Never. Now people don’t bother to buy songs. T-series is also selling mp3 player and divx player. They expect that every one will play legal mp3 and divx files!!! How many legal mp3 you can buy in the market??

Sequoia will hopefully try to bail out the Guruji team. But thats behind the scenes. I was refering to their continued public silence on this matter. If T-Series' case was completely baseless, by now Sequoia should have defended its portfolio publicly. No?
As for the difference between Guruji and other meta search engine, it doesnt really matter if they are different, does it? Just because there are a lot of pirates in the market, piracy cannot ever be considered legal or ethical…. The all important question here is whether the Indian courts find Guruji to be in violation of existing copyright law or not. If they do, this could open up a Pandora's box for others too. Lets hope instead that the copyright law itself is updated to include specific direction for Digital/Internet businesses. We really need an Indian equivalent of the DCMA act to settle this matter once and for all. Ambiguity will only hurt all parties in the eco system…

Sequoia will hopefully try to bail out the Guruji team. But thats behind the scenes. I was refering to their continued public silence on this matter. If T-Series' case was completely baseless, by now Sequoia should have defended its portfolio publicly. No?
As for the difference between Guruji and other meta search engine, it doesnt really matter if they are different, does it? Just because there are a lot of pirates in the market, piracy cannot ever be considered legal or ethical…. The all important question here is whether the Indian courts find Guruji to be in violation of existing copyright law or not. If they do, this could open up a Pandora's box for others too. Lets hope instead that the copyright law itself is updated to include specific direction for Digital/Internet businesses. We really need an Indian equivalent of the DCMA act to settle this matter once and for all. Ambiguity will only hurt all parties in the eco system…

"Lets hope instead that the copyright law itself is updated to include specific direction for Digital/Internet businesses. "

I hope so too. I don't agree on the DMCA bit, though. It puts the onus entirely on the copyright owner to keep pointing out copyright violation, with no real monetary compensation for what they invest in tracking. At the same time, the infringing party (say, a blog scraping content and running an ad network), needs to do little, and gets monetized easily. There are two sides to the DMCA Act, and DMCA is heavily against copyright owners.

For the record, we contacted Sequoia Capital for Guruji's side of the story, for comments either from them, guruji or their legal representatives. They declined to comment.

"Lets hope instead that the copyright law itself is updated to include specific direction for Digital/Internet businesses. "

I hope so too. I don't agree on the DMCA bit, though. It puts the onus entirely on the copyright owner to keep pointing out copyright violation, with no real monetary compensation for what they invest in tracking. At the same time, the infringing party (say, a blog scraping content and running an ad network), needs to do little, and gets monetized easily. There are two sides to the DMCA Act, and DMCA is heavily against copyright owners.

For the record, we contacted Sequoia Capital for Guruji's side of the story, for comments either from them, guruji or their legal representatives. They declined to comment.

Oh, I completely agree with you on that front! I think the DMCA stacked the odds against copyright owners.

1. Guruji is showing enough warning to the users for Non-Guruji Content.
2. Music industry has yet not found any good way to protect copyright (except legal force !) and trying to force new/innovative/upcoming guys just down
3. Guruji has found ecosystem , user interest in music search and that's why it is growing fast !
4. Guruji itself is not hosting any copyrighted content !
5. Many of sites from where content is showing/downloaded free are violating copyright and Not Guruji. Inded they are the actual victim, and not Guruji !
6. T-Series should invest in some technology to attack copyright problem instead of putting legal force on wrong guy !

i think guruji is in safe place and should not have much trouble in court (except some bad publicity and brand damage !)

Raxit

ANALOGY 1
A politician gets away with murder, a civilian can’t. Does it mean the politician is right ? Does it mean civilian should be spared because u cannot catch a politician. hence to be ARRESTED

ANALOGY 2
If u cannot catch Al Qaeda Chief (songs.pk), does not mean u will not catch people who fund them. If i catch a person who funds them (clearly guruji’s ad fund songs.pk) and ask them contacts of Al Qaeda and they refuse in name of policy (Guruji.com did that to more than few content owners and legal entities), u clearly are not supporting a legal drill and therefore are liable for obstructing justice hence to be ARRESTED

ANALOGY 3
Its a classic case of ENRON debacle, while auditors are there to ensure systems are in place. u can choose to be an auditor of righteous company or a illegal company, if company is clearly established to be “ILLEGAL” then auditors face the axe. In this case clearly everyone agrees songs.pk is “ILLEGAL” . hence to be ARRESTED

ANALOGY 4
If i ask a person where is closest WHORE HOUSE, and he points to “XYZ” he is clear of blame. But if he points a particular “XYZ” and therefore this person takes role of a pimp, and inturn provides them infrastructure to do prostitution and revenues through customers, he needs is party to crime as PROSTITUTION is illegal. A PIMP is as illegal as the whore itself. No prices for guessing who the PIMP and the WHORE is. hence to be ARRESTED.

I like the “LIBERAL INTERNET team” favouring search engine in name of DEMOCRACY And TECHNOLOGY. But whats important is to know the root cause.
I also bet none of the persons supporting “Search engines” have owned content.
Two wrong don’t make one right, if GOOGLE does it does not mean its LEGAL.
GURUJI.com may get away purely because million’s of users who are not paying for content will support guruji

Clearly GURUJI.com chose to hide behind search engine “unbaised” algorithm but inturn did not make it unbaised, but clearly favour one particular sight which they knew is making illicit money. __I cannot believe a bunch of intelligent tech dudes @ guruji were not aware of illegal pirated music sites, sure they were aware. Instead of making a product like a picassa, or google earth OR maps for india OR auction site OR many business models, they clearly too a cheeky way out.

GOOGLE’s DEFENCE
GOOGLE probably is not as vulnerable as guruji but also being closely watched.
It is not as much under the radar because they have no preferred destination to pirated music. is also addressing the same with their “Classified” music project. it may not address piracy completely. Also if i tell GOOGLE as a CONTENT OWNER with proof of ownership, that ads on songs.pk need to be shared, they will address these issues ASAP either by revenue share or by disabling ads.
Also GOOGLE has given permission to major content owner and infact all of them tou point out what’s illegal, the same content will not be shown as a policy. There is no such policy from songs.pk.

What is revenue model of guruji ? What is revenue model for songs.pk ? Both are ad revenues.
Guruji was clearly favouring songs.pk and gives ad revenues shared with an illegal website. Songs.pk also needs to go down but being hosted out of Czech republic just makes them difficult to hunt. I am sure guruji.com knew that, but GURUJI when approached on their stand on disclosing songs.pk identity, said its our policy not to disclose identity.If you are grilled by an authority on
But if guruji was making them survive by pumping revenues then clearly it is abeting illegal set up. And up until recently Guruji was also powering their search, so u support them financially, technologically, make money out of ads which u power, clearly is illegal.

Apart from many users who were using guruji for finding music, they will feel a bit bad but by now guruji might have made users used to songs.pk which is default destination for pirated music and therefore a massive industry is bleeding.

It is left to see how the safe harbor principle is applied here by the Indian court. ISPs, Webhosts and Auction sites use this on their defense.

Am I the only one who finds it highly ironic. T-series accuses someone of IP theft????? Hahahahahaha….

Talk about hypocracy. Isnt this the same company, where Gulshan Kumar showed up and gave good ol' Yashji a big suitcase of cash saying "I stole Lamhe's music & felt you should get atleast a small portion of the earnings?"

T-series is just dangerously connected and thats it. This is even more hilarious than Google's BS of "Do no evil"

T-Series has been suing all in sight over the lst 4-5 years – some correctly so and some I am not sure why!