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Court Rules Playlist Customization Is Not Interactive
prostoalex writes "Is music played via customized playlist delivered interactively (i.e., via user participation) or non-interactive (i.e., decisions are made on the server side)? The question does seem metaphysical, but it took Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Yahoo! six years to figure it out via a protracted legal battle. User-driven playlists are bucketed with on-demand music services, while server-driven playlists are equaled to broadcasts, thereby causing different licensing mechanisms to take place. Yahoo! inherited the legal wrangle when it purchased a music startup Launch, which built a music recommendation feature. The court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site."
Well those requests typically are broadcast. Hence the person doing the broadcasting is a "broadcaster". A list of songs delivered to one individual based on their preferences is clearly not broadcast and the person operating the service should not be called a "broadcaster". The selection method doesn't have anything to do with whether you're broadcasting.
Pandora: there is some user interaction to shape the channel with seeds for artist and/or songs to play similar to or avoid.
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
I don't think someone knows what that word means...
Always nice to see the law actually functioning in the interest of the people as opposed to the interest of the money. Although, in cases involving RIAA and similar parties, it usually feels like a close escape when the ruling goes as it seems to have gone this time. Rather than that, I would like to be able to actually have full trust in the law in these cases, not feel like every battle is a close win, likely to be followed by another few losses for the people (f.ex. EU's IPRED2).
Don't be crazy anymore!
I always assumed that stations had a playlist that wasn't deviated from. To get a "request", they just wait until someone rings up asking for the song they were going to play anyway. Or maybe I'm just too cynical for my own good?
What's the difference between me choosing what music I listen to and a radio station doing the same? Both is music, both plays equally long (provided we pick music that covers the same amount of time), then why is "my" selection more expensive than one someone else put together?
Could it be that I can't be showered with current "hits" when I choose my music? Heaven forbid that people actually choose the music they want to hear!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But... If you went back in time and became a lawyer specialising in internet law then you would not learn the skills to create the time machine in the first place, which means you couldn't go back in time to become a lawyer specialising in internet law... i think we may have encountered some sort of paradoxic issue with time travel here.
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When reading these types of thread about the record business special interest group finding ways to bend the law, I find something very depressing about the fact that those who are supposed to be in charge of the 'stewardship' of copyrights seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that a lot of the music they own doesn't ever get exposed, and since nobody will ever know about it, that it'll never sell. But actually, there are a lot of music lovers out there donating their time to upload torrents of many obscure records which haven't been in print for a great many years, and most likely will never be made available commercially again... and in the same fashion there are also any who contribute to projects such as Pandora and Last.fm
So against all odds, and no matter the Kafka-esque hurdles these people are trying to put up at every possible moment, it is still comforting to know that despite their best efforts to muzzle non-top 40 music, a lot of it will survive because there are many others out there who care about it quite deeply, not for money, but out of LOVE, and because it is part of our cultural heritage.
And in some way it is comforting to think that after putting out so much negative energy, bad vibes, and consistently having so few innovative ideas or vision on what is really needed in today's marketplace to make artists sell some records, (besides suing the pants out of everyone they can) the very people responsible for lobbying for all of this arguably short-sighted legislation are going to get what's coming to them, i.e.: the opportunity to re-tool and learn a new trade very soon.
It's kind of futile to argue against a tidal wave; it's what this particular situation reminds me of.
In the meantime, and until this takes place, there is no question that if I had a Net radio show or anything of that sort, I'd make sure that the servers streaming it are hosted somewhere which cannot be impacted by any such legislative measures.
Z.
I have heard of RTFA, but jesus RTFS... The courts ruled that it was all "broadcast radio" If they had ruled differently THEN your statement would apply but since the Judge in this case actually had a brain, we don't have to worry about that now.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
The world is turning into something out of a low-budget SciFi episode, a planet overrun by procedural paper pushers defining the physical world by legal statute. Sadly, it's not fiction, and we have no heroes to save the day.
The vast majority of good legal decisions are either "obvious" to anyone moderately sane (eg. dealing with an observed killing), or else they're shrouded in complexity that makes no single outcome fully just.
The first type needs nothing more than recourse to a "Fair Witness" (Heinlein's term, but there's some of it in the Jedi concept too, minus fighting), a person whose reputation is based on objectivity and fairness and plain commonsense -- no need for technicalities and legal dickering to come into it at all, by the definition of "obvious". A societal judge without court and with only one Law, simple fairness.
And the second type is handled equally well by the roll of a die --- after all, no single outcome is just. And dice do have the benefit of statistical fairness, which is more than can be said for the legal process where alleged "fairness" depends on your ability to afford good legal representation.
There is something fundamentally flawed in a system where years of arguing are considered to somehow yield justice, as if the cost didn't matter and the time lost meant nothing. Even if all costs were met uniformly out of the public purse, this still would not address the sheer deep freeze that legal proceedings place on society. Time is our most precious commodity, yet as this example showed, this is totally unappreciated in law.
Be that as it may, the current situation is nothing short of appalling, and getting steadily worse. We need a sort of French Revolution to lop off the heads of this new legal aristocracy, but I don't see that happenning --- we're stuck with this mess for the forseeable future, or at least as long as we're tied to this planet. Woes.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Basically for any major metropolitan area, an "all request hour" will run about 15 songs. So the only way your request is honored is if you are one of those 15 songs. . . which is extremely rare.
However, they WILL record your request and play it back later as a "request"; happens rather frequently.
That said, I used to get requests regularly in East Lansing when I was a pizza delivery driver, but that's because I annoyed the shit out of them, calling all the time.
Also, they failed about a year after I started working at Alexander's. Which I'm sure had nothing to do with the music I requested, but thanks for implying that, jerks.
You better watch out, there may be dogs about . .