Wasn’t it just other day that Michael Arrington was whining about how unfair and mean people were to him? And yet that didn’t stop Erick Schonfeld from running a long story on TechCrunch about a completely baseless rumor that Last.Fm was sharing user data with the RIAA in order to track down people who had obtained leaked copies of the new U2 album.
The rumor Schonfeld chose to higlight was even third-hand as reported by his alleged source,
As a result, word is going around that the RIAA asked social music service Last.fm for data about its user’s listening habits to find people with unreleased tracks on their computers. And Last.fm, which is owned by CBS, actually handed the data over to the RIAA, according to a tip we received:
I heard from an irate friend who works at CBS that last.fm recently provided the RIAA with a giant dump of user data to track down people who are scrobbling unreleased tracks. As word spread numerous employees at last.fm were up in arms because the data collected (a) can be used to identify individuals and (b) will likely be shared with 3rd parties that have relationships with the RIAA.
What an asshole. If this were true, this would pretty much kill Last.Fm like yesterday. To run such a rumor based on “some guy told me he heard from this other guy …” is just idiotic. Schonfeld would be fired at any organization with ethics, but presumably Arrington is still crying like a goddamn baby about how no one is nice to him anymore to pay much attention.
At least Last.Fm didn’t release some boring denial,
So do us a favour – if you see people spreading the rumour, refer them to this blog post and mention you heard from a friend that “Techcrunch are full of shit.”
Yeah, I think we’ve known that all along.
