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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?
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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...)
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.
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"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?
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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.
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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"
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()".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Yeah, try that defense :)
As a side note, I certainly hope you aren't looking for logic in copyright law!
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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.
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 !!!!