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RIAA Loses Case Against Launch Media
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes "The RIAA's claim that personalized internet radio stations were 'interactive services' was flatly rejected 'as a matter of law' by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Arista Records v. Launch Media. In affirming the jury's verdict in favor of the defendant, Launch Media — acquired during the lawsuit by Yahoo! — the Court said it did not even need to concern itself with possible errors in the jury instructions, since the trial judge should have directed a verdict for defendant 'as a matter of law' on the question of whether the radio stations were 'interactive services.' At pages 23-42 of its 42-page opinion (PDF), the appeals court carefully analyzed how Launch Media's personalized internet radio stations worked, and noted that the users could neither obtain and play on demand a particular song, nor obtain the transmission of a particular program, thus rendering the RIAA's claim of 'interactivity' meritless."
I can't wait for the day that headline becomes so commonplace I get bored of it.
My webcomic
Pandora has some semblance of interactivity that regular streaming radio does not.
You can vote song/artists off the island, and fine tune the selection to your particular tastes.
Still, you might be on to something here because you still can't order up a song at will, nor know what is coming ahead of time.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Right. I just read over the whole decision, and other than the details of the specific implementation, the overall logic of the random/unpredictable nature of the playlist is what makes it non-interactive. In the LAUNCH service in question, users rated songs individually as well, and were also able to skip them as you are in Pandora. I think this stencils pretty directly onto the other service, right? users are unable to choose the specific song in either case, only preferences.
I have a request from Slashdot based on this post.
We need a -1: Stupid.
It's not trolling, nor really flamebait, nor offtopic, or redundant. Also, offtopic just isn't quite enough.
As for why I feel that way: Interactive, the way you see it, would mean that radios are interactive. Which would break the whole idea of broadcast to start with. After all, I set my dial to a channel and listen. If I don't like it, I can switch stations. In fact, I know what genres the stations tend to play, so I can add them to a "favorites" list called presets if I like them. The broadcast stations react to listeners by tracking how many they have and adjusting content to keep and expand that base. And, if listeners disappear, a station will react to that input (or lack thereof) and shutdown or change genres.
Oh, even better, many of these stations "take requests" from some listeners and then play those songs. In that regard, broadcast radio is *more interactive* than the services presented by Launch, and Pandora.
So... I don't know what exactly you were going for in your post, but this has nothing to do with just hate for the RIAA... This is a case where we finally see someone applying common sense and *law* to a lawsuit.
'read over' isn't the same as actually reading everything.
Your opinion is irrelevant, as is mine. The only people who's opinions matter, that is the appeals court, decided that it isn't interactive.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
A lot of people would rate -1: Stupid for things they don't agree with regardless of the content of what is being posted.