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Ministry of Sound Suing Spotify Over User Playlists
AmiMoJo writes "The Ministry of Sound, a UK dance music brand, is suing Spotify because it has not removed users' playlists that mirror their compilation albums. The case will hinge on whether compilation albums qualify for copyright protection due to the selection and arrangement involved in putting them together. Spotify has the rights to stream all the tracks on the playlists in question, but the issue here is whether the compilation structure — the order of the songs — can be copyrighted."
Why do these assholes care so much?
Dangerous, sexy, turing complete: Femme Bots
Music over money!
Fuck both the parties.
I went to the associated nightclub (Ministry of Sound in Elephant and Castle, London). I'm not sure the order of the tracks matters -- they all sound the same anyway!
(And I like some genres of electronic music...)
Strings of ones and zeroes can be copyrighted. A a total ordering can be encoded in a string of ones and zeroes. Therefore ordering is copyrightable. Boom! Fool proof.
Two, Zero, One, Four, Zero, One, Zero, One. Tada! Now make sure you give me money at the start of next year please!
I for one am disappointed that the UK government is continuing to waste my taxes on such nonsensical legal debates!
I can now copywrite my grocery list? Sweet!
This is essentially the phone book argument all over again. Just because you put the names in the phone book in a specific order, does not give you ownership over the data. They would essentially be saying that the individual artists couldn't collectively create a CD in the same order, because Ministry of Sound has a partial copyright over how they can display their own works. A list is just that, a collection of things. Unless the Ministry of Sound is mixing these songs together then they have no right to claim song orders are copyrighted, and even then they would only retain a copyright over the specific mix, not the arrangement of the mix. To put this succinctly, if this were able to go through Barnes and Nobles could sue Waldenbooks for an alphabetized organization of books.
You're only pissed because you didn't create a decent streaming service first. Now go back and sulk in your corner, you petulant bitch.
In the USA, this would likely boil down to how much creativity went into the list and whether its use is causes any economic harm to the copyright owner.
From a non-legal perspective, I think the music company is being foolish. They may win this battle in court but they are alienating their customers in the process. This is not the way to win friends and influence money-spending people.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
"What we do is a lot more than putting playlists together: a lot of research goes into creating our compilation albums"
Ouch! My sides are hurting from laughing after reading that.
Seriously, how much research does selecting a a number of Top 100 chart songs that aren't too dissimilar really involve that make it so vastly different from the mixtapes many of us made back in the days?
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
I'd ban the name Ministry of Sound in titles. You can't claim copyright on a playlist of songs that aren't yours and they have the legal rights to play. You can protect your name but that's it.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Theoretically, a playlist/mix should be eligible for protection under copyright law. It's just that a copyright only protects a work from being copied. It's different from patents. If two independent people come to the same idea, there is no cause of action between them under copyright law. Someone needs to be able to show by a preponderance of the evidence someone copied someone else. It would be hard to prove someone 'copied' a playlist. It works with easier with recordings or specific songs, but I'm sure multiple people would create a playlist with both "Harder Better Faster" and "Get Lucky"
Europe created a 'database right', where an assembly of non-copyrighted items is itself copyrightable as an assembly. USA wasn't that dumb.
It's one of the dumbest IP rights ever invented and simply caused monopolies in stuff like telephone directories, TV listings etc. It was to encourage the assembly of databases, but actually had a major impact on it (because no giant database could be constructed because smaller fragments existed in other databases, so overall far fewer databases of each type exist).
Oh, and fuck off NSA. Not related to the article, but I just skipped a flight booking because the airline used 'Sabre' and I don't see why NSA should have that data for their giant illegal mass surveillance database. Hello Sabre, you sided with the Stasi and I decided to boycott every airline that uses your system to book flights.
Assuming there was an iota of human creativity involved, Americans who bother to put their grocery lists into a tangible form have been given copyrights on them since the late 1980s, if not longer.
An interesting thing about copyrights: While it rarely has any legal meaning, two people who independently create the same work can hold copyright to the same item. It's rare that this has any legal impact for truly creative works because if the second person to create the work did so after the first work was published, registered, or otherwise put in a place where the second person might have been exposed to it, he won't be able to claim "independent" creation. However, it does have practical value when it comes to very short things like short sentences, short poems, and probably short grocery lists.
It also comes into play with "functional" items like relatively short blocks of computer code where there may be very little "flexibility" in how you code something. For example, if I come up with a 5-line sorting algorithm and describe it in text (not code) form, two readers may independently implement the algorithm in the same language, call the function "sort," and use "a, b, c, etc" or even "i, j, k, etc." as variable names, not do any comments, etc. and result in exactly the same implementation. Both have a copyright on the implementation, just as much as if they had named the variables after their children's pets and called the function "newsortireadinabooksomewhere()".
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Next step: Mc Donald's suing Burger King, and myself suing Gusetau's!
The menus have been clearly copied!
Yea shame on them for trying to defend their business model, which is their feudatory duty to their share holders. Don't get me wrong, their business model sucks, but if they don't defend it they aren't doing their jobs.
Such bullshit always comes up on these stories. "Sure, the company pumped toxic waste into the ground water, but they have a duty to their share holders to maximize profits!" Bull. Shat.
Tell MoS to suck it. It's not Spotify's fault that its users are creating playlists that are "copies" of compilation albums and neither is it Spotify's job to prevent such a thing from happening. If they wanted to stay profitable, perhaps they should have taken the time to form a business around providing an actual product and/or service rather than stumbling around a 1 room "apartment" saying "Duuuuuude" oh, sorry, UK: "Maaaaate, that mixed tape is wizard. You should sell it and cut me in on the profits!"
You're thinking of Feist v. Rural, in which the courts held that collections *might* be copyrightable, if there were originality in the selection, order or presentation of the list. (and well, everyone in a given area, in alphabetical order, as a standard phone book didn't qualify).
So, if this is just a '20 best songs', by some well known metric, it's not an original selection. They *might* have done some work to deal with the ordering ... many DJs will consider the tempo of the outro / intro of songs so that they flow well from one to another. (but in that case, they also sync them up and overlap them).
Oh ... and most bookstores use BISAC, not alphabetical order. They might use alpha within give sections.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
UK copyright law has a specific category for "typographical arrangements" that is a right to a particular anthologisation. The classic example would be the church hymn book. I am allowed to compile as many different hymn books with different selections of hymns, and different selections of verses for each hymn, but I couldn't just copy someone's selection hymn for hymn, verse for verse. This recognises the time and effort expended on making the selection, and guarantees that the person who takes that time and effort isn't going to get undercut by some low-rent publishing outfit who immediately clones his product. (The fact that many of these hymnal publishers also engage in the morally dubious practice of "copyright pollution" by making minor alterations to the hymns themselves is by-the-bye.)
One of the bestbits about this particular provision is that it implicitly recognises that a typographical arrangement is intrinsically less valuable than an original work -- they are protected for 25 years from the year of publication.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
It was decided a while back that while you can't copyright an individual record of a database that contains public information. You can copyright the database in its entirety.
If a duplicated exactly every record of your million record database, its a good chance I just copied it instead of collected the data myself. If I copy your 10 record database exactly, or public information, can you really prove I copied your database?
Remove one song from each MoS album from the Spotify library, and go tell MoS to stick it where the sun don't shine.
Does that mean they have to take down the listings of what on the CD from websites that sell the CD? There is where I got this list of tosh from.
Disc 1
Robin S - Show Me Love
Gat Décor - Passion (Naked Mix)
Sandy B - Make The World Go Round (Deep Dish Radio Edit)
Ken Doh - Nakasaki (I Need A Lover Tonight)
Rhythm On The Loose - Break of Dawn
Alex Party - Alex Party (Saturday Night Party)
and much more shite.
They're essentially saying that if I have the right to listen to all the tracks, I cannot choose to listen to them in the same order they put them in unless they've been paid? pure nonsense.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Yes, when the original composers and artists of the songs themselves release an album your logic applies. If somebody else were to mix a bunch of 3rd party songs and try to sell them on a CD the "artistic decision" of the original artists and composers is absent.
Just to be the devils advocate here; would it be right for Spotify or its users to claim copyright over all their playlists? They're released publicly and required "artistic decision" to create.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101103/14362311708/ministry-of-sound-ditches-file-sharing-lawsuits-after-it-finds-out-that-bt-actually-protects-user-privacy.shtml
Turns out they didn't have standing to sue for the actual music as they were basically DJ mixtapes which they had licensed the music for, so they where suing over the copyright of the tracklistings..
At least stateside, "facts" aren't copyrightable. This applies (for example) to phone books -- but perhaps even more applicable is recipes. You can copyright the comments *about* a recipe, but the recipe, itself, is not copyrightable. It seems to me that it's a fairly small leap from an ordered list of ingredients to an ordered list of songs.
Of course the order matters. If I order the 0s and 1s according to size on my hard disk, there is not seriously anything copyrightable left.
Compilations like the "Beatles Red" and "Beatles Blue" album are arguably more important regarding the order of pieces than the original media they have been compiled from: people expect to hear a certain order they have come to appreciate.
Typical "Best of Classics" compilations where individual most popular movements are ripped out of context and juxtaposed without rhyme nor reason are usually an abomination not worth hearing: they are just too incoherent and distracting.
So yes: definitely copyrightable. Whether that means that one wants to appear one stupid prissy ass over such matter is a different question.
There are two questions here: an ontological one (is authorial intent immanent in a playlist?), and a moral one (would it be right to claim copyright over all of one's publicly created playlists?). Of the two, the ontological one is fundamental to the moral one. If authorial intent is not reflected in the playlist, then there is no moral argument.
Books are protected. What are they but letters combined to words and sentences?
For years the UK football leagues was pulling the same shit suing people who lists their match schedule on websites without paying them, until someone got tired of their bullshit and took them to court.
In 2012 a judge made a landmark decision and told the football leagues to fuck off. Re-shuffling data was no longer considered 'creative' and thus could no longer be copyrighted.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17218968
The order in which the songs in an album is compiled is a creative work, and therefore is copyrighted (in the US anyway). Consider what the Queen album "News of the World" would be like if it didn't start with "We Will Rock You," immediately followed by "We Are the Champions?" It wouldn't be the same album, and it wouldn't flow as smoothly. There are many artists who spend a lot of time planning the order of songs on their albums; some of whom complain quite openly about their fans shuffling the songs on their devices.
As for expecting Spotify to remove user-created playlists which duplicate the contents and order of songs on an album, well, that's another matter entirely.
The order of songs in a compilation is the only original thing they can copyright as the songs are largely all vapid and derivative anyways.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
and it fell flat in court. the copyright order of songs in an album pertains to that album.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Who, exactly, is it who made the playlist?
Say I've bought their CD, but I also use Spotify. If I make a playlist of songs based on an album I own, WTF does this have to do with Spotify and MoS?
If Spotify themselves is making a playlist based on a compilation, well, then maybe I can see it because I think the specific compilation of tracks is copyright-able.
Granted, I'm still old school and actually still buy a lot of CDs, which I then rip and play on whatever device I choose; so I'm not exactly using Spotify or anything similar, so I don't know much about the mechanics of it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And to think that before, I used to love the compilations that MoS released, especially their Annual compilations. However, they have gone down the tubes in recent years and tech has also made sharing music much much easier now. That being said, I still think MoS getting worked up over playlists is frackin' stupid.
INTP type 5w4
Of course the users' playlists are copyrighted. Just because it's publicly shared doesn't mean there aren't copyright and licensing issues. Open source software is copyrighted, and usually has a specific license, even though it's publicly available.
By the original artists? Sure. But on a compilation album, to consider it artistic would be to consider it a derivative work - which requires approval from the artist and different licensing than just releasing the songs on CD. And I'm pretty sure MoS only paid for the latter. And if so, then how can they claim copyright on the ordering?
Sigh
the music itself is just a list of discrete digital values arranged in a particular order. You can't copyright binary numbers. How can they copyright that order?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
You can't copyright a playlist, just like you can't copyright a recipe. Asshats.
Now all someone need to do is to generate a list of all the possible combinations of their tracks and that will limit play order on their conserts somewhat ..
Has anybody ever established a lower limit on bits of data that can be copyrighted? Is it possible to copyright a one-liner? Trademark, sure; but nobody is using "A man walks into a bar, ouch that hurts he said" as a trademark.
Song arrangement takes up bandwidth that's even less than a one-liner or short phrase. Based on that alone it shouldn't be subject to copyright. Also, set lists have been posted on fan sites as long as I remember and nobody ever said anything.
How many orders of magnitude on the probability of a random shuffling do you need before something is copyright-able? A compilation can't be much higher than ~10 orders of magnitude.
Suing over something silly is an old trick to get publicity. There are sure to be people who have never heard of "The Ministry of Sound," who hear about the lawsuit, and decide to check out the music just to see what the hoopla is about. They might lose the lawsuit, but still win new customers.
The one thing that truly sucks about digital music is the death of "mix tapes". Playlists have always been a shitty alternative and some in the industry apparently don't even want those to be shared.
Someone needs to fix this. I'm sure there's an income stream there somewhere.
If they win this case, it will open them up to massive copyright trolling :
1. Make list of all chart or dance club hits from the last 6 months
2. Autogenerate every permutation of playlist possible from this list and publish it on your website "Monastery of Shite"
3. Sue when next complilation is issued and PROFIT
Hey........ this plan works !!!!
Fiduciary duty means the officers have a duty to not place their personal interests above those of the shareholders. For example, they can't take corporate money (shareholder money) and put it in their own pocket.
To understand fiduciary duty, think about housesitting. A house sitter has a fiduciary duty to take care of the home as the homeowner would, not throw a wild party that wrecks the house.
So the question for the executives is "what would the shareholders do?" Many corporations have charters explicitly laying out things like environmental protection etc.
If they think they can make the case sue the users who made the playlists and if anyone are responsible for copyright violations!!
but in this case, where is the music?