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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
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.
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!
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"
wait, there are only two?
I'm sorry, but i'm going to use Zero, One, Zero, One, Two, Zero, One, Four instead.
Oh, and you owe me $1.06USD for the use of the character strings "One" and "Four" in the preceding post.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
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!"
By that logic Ministry of Sound should sue Amazon for publishing track lists for almost every MOS compilation
I don't read replies by ACs.
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.
That may be their next step. But the case against Amazon will be stronger if they first establish a precedent against a defendant with shallower pockets.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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.
I don't think they would sue a company that actually helps them sell their stuff. However, I think it is quite difficult for MOS to argue that Spotify is infringing copyright while Amazon isn't.
I don't read replies by ACs.
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.
No, in the US they have a good argument. The issue is whether there was sufficient creativity in the selection of which tracks to include, and which order to arrange them in, as to justify a copyright.
The white pages in a phone book could be copyrightable. But so long as the selection of information is merely the name of the telephone subscriber, their address, and their number, and the order is merely alphabetical, in last name order, it's not creative; all the white pages are like that, and the reason is to make them useful.
A phone book that only included certain people arbitrarily chosen by the compiler, and which arranged them in an arbitrary, creative way, could be protected. (The individual names, numbers, and addresses could still be copied; they're unprotectable facts, but they'd have to be rearranged, and ideally mixed with the information of people who were not included). But a phone book like this would be useless as a general purpose directory. A specialty directory, sure -- e.g. a phone book of places a tourist should see in a foreign city -- but this isn't usually what people want.
Here, unless the authorized compilation albums include everything (or everything that could be included subject to some non-creative constraint, such as all the recordings to which the issuer of the compilation has rights), and unless they're arranged in some uncreative order, such as chronological order, or alphabetical order, it sounds worthy of a copyright to me.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
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
However, if they did not procure a license to make a "derivative work" and only to release the tracks on a CD, then how can you consider the arrangement of tracks to be a separate work that can be copyrighted? They would have to get permission from the copyright holder and probably pay additional royalties.
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?
If you don't want users rearranging or skipping tracks, you can record them all as a single track, like Jethro Tull did.
Have gnu, will travel.
The economics of patent trolling are that one can make more money from extortion than from producing a product. Under those circumstances, it makes perfect sense to sue a company that "helps" them sell their stuff.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
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 ..
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.
Well, this case is taking place in the UK, and I don't know anything about their law (other than that they have wigs, which seem neat). My analysis is more or less how it would work out in the US.
In the US, a derivative work is not the same thing as a compilation. (Although I suppose it is possible to have a compilation which is itself derivative of a preexisting compilation)
Here are the relevant bits of the statute:
17 USC 101
A âoecompilationâ is a work formed by the collection and assembling of preexisting materials or of data that are selected, coordinated, or arranged in such a way that the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship. The term âoecompilationâ includes collective works.
A âoederivative workâ is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a âoederivative workâ.
17 USC 103
(a) The subject matter of copyright as specified by section 102 includes compilations and derivative works, but protection for a work employing preexisting material in which copyright subsists does not extend to any part of the work in which such material has been used unlawfully.
(b) The copyright in a compilation or derivative work extends only to the material contributed by the author of such work, as distinguished from the preexisting material employed in the work, and does not imply any exclusive right in the preexisting material. The copyright in such work is independent of, and does not affect or enlarge the scope, duration, ownership, or subsistence of, any copyright protection in the preexisting material.
If the compiler has the right to make the compilations at all, which they apparently do (or is someone arguing that Ministry of Sound is itself a pirate?), then they'd automatically get a copyright on the compilation if the compilation meets the requirements for copyrightability, the main one for compilations typically being whether there was sufficient creativity in the selection and arrangement of the material compiled.
Now, it's possible that a condition for including a particular recording might be to assign the compilation copyright back to the licensor of the recording, so that they end up with the compilation copyright. But barring that, the law says that the copyright in the compilation automatically subsists in the author, i.e. the compiler. Permission is required to make the compilation, but that doesn't change the law.
Again, of course, that's how it would be in the US. In the UK, who knows?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.