As someone who worked in the payment gateway industry, they go through underwriting. They provide all necessary documentation, a person reviews it and periodically re-reviews that information. Another item to note is that the Sponsor Bank sets most of these rules. For a product that is making <$100/mo, the risk is too great and not worth answering a ton of questions every month by the sponsor bank and/or visa/mc each time the re-review comes up.

This. It's a simple calculation of risk vs profit. Payment gateways are happy to put up with more risk, and put more effort into de-risking you as a client, if they are getting lots of profits from you.

Whereas if you have a turnover of $10k/year, and they're earning only 0.5% of that in fees, then it isn't worth them taking much risk or putting much effort in to earn $50.

It would be nice if people like stripe were more upfront about this. They could easily say "We have determined that your business might be high risk for us. If you pay us $1000 (which will be credited towards transaction fees), then we will work with you to mitigate these risks".

> It would be nice if people like stripe were more upfront about this. They could easily say "We have determined that your business might be high risk for us. If you pay us $1000 (which will be credited towards transaction fees), then we will work with you to mitigate these risks".

Nowadays people are tip-toe-ing around egg shells constantly to avoid being the latest outrage that goes viral, but that would be wildly refreshing to see. Honesty from companies (even internally when you work for them!) is getting so rare that a blunt and honest message like that makes me happy just to think about.

It would be awesome to start a new cultural movement toward radical honesty. Just being able to acknowledge the realities around incentives would be a great start.

Problem is our common law system incentivizes dishonesty. There is also the problem that everyone tends to start suing the financier if they can't get the results they want out of the business, and the cumulative end result is that financial institutions (through the resulting excess of caution) have become de facto arbiters of legitimate economic activity rather than dumb pipes.

For some people this is apparently okay and desirable. To me it's horrifying, and tends toward centralizing power far too much.

Appreciate the inside perspective.

By being well known, established brands. Sad but true

Silicon Valley and investor nepotism. The sad reality is that tech, no matter what size, is an elite club. Some get to play, some don’t.

Responding to and complying with DMCA take downs and making efforts to ban repeat infringers probably. Also a large enough client that their head of sales/revenue would notice if they suddenly disappeared.

You're implying that OP failed to do so, but you have no evidence of that.

By offering storage solutions, not music storage solutions.

(not blaming OP, it's a cool project and a shame that people aren't being allowed to exercise their right to make a private copy)

Well, maybe they don't use Stripe for payment processing?

In what way is uploading the music you bought to private cloud storage illegal?

Google Music asked me to upload songs and I did. Is Google really going to get sued to oblivion? I doubt it.

Depends where you live

In the UK its technically illegal to rip a CD to your own PC to back it up, for example, see the recent high court case(s) about it where the government won against Brennan (who make hifi gear which can do this) - no different to this app.

In 2014 the government passed a law making ripping explicitly legal. In 2015 the music industry sued and the High Court ruled that the law was contrary to some EU directive and thus invalid. But I don't know if that law was annulled by the court decision, or if it was merely dormant until we left the EU. The Brennan ripping devices are still on sale. Do you have a link to this case?

I was under the impression that this had been changed in the last few years. Do you have a link for that case?

I’m still getting adverts for Brennan thingies online, did they find a way around the court judgement?

Google Music (fka Google Play Music) have license agreements! e.g. https://www.cmrra.ca/socan-csi-strike-licensing-deal-with-go...

Part of the reason google/youtube are quasi-monopolistic is that they've already been through all of this, they've had the arguments and the lawsuits in various different territories, and they've reached agreements and paid money to deal with the copyright issues.

They had matching though, so if you had a lousy quality mp3 that matches through audio fingerprinting it would be upgraded.

To be fair, the music industry knows they couldn't beat Google in court on this.

The same can't be said for OP who probably doesn't have the time or money to fight it as evidenced by this post.

Did you miss this sentence, or are you disagreeing with it?

> According to Capitol Records, Inc. v. MP3Tunes, LLC, this is absolutely OK in the eyes of the law

What precisely does "this" refer to in that sentence?

https://casetext.com/case/capitol-records-inc-v-mp3tunes-llc

From a quick read of that, it appears that Mp3tunes lost the case, had a huge damages award made against them, as happens a lot, and the overall damages were deemed excessive and reduced to $750k.

I haven't actually read the case, but from the summaries I've seen it sounds like MP3Tunes won on the parts that matter when it comes to whether or not one can legally run a music locker service without permission from the copyright owners.

In particular is said that the DMCA safe harbor is available to such services, and that deduplication is not a problem.

MP3Tunes did not adequately deal with DMCA takedown requests so didn't get full safe harbor protection leaving them liable for some user's uploads. Also MP3Tunes' founder had infringing songs stored and they got nailed for those.

This is straight up victim blaming.