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."

Comments

Don't they have something better to do?

[markkezner]

Why do these assholes care so much?

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a company that makes money by taking other people's songs and releasing "compilation albums" of things that someone thought went well together.

So, yes, they could actually go out and get real jobs.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[dywolf]

yes. they need to be suiig google/youtube for not removing video playlists that match their albums.
assuming their dumb enough to poke the sleeping bear.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[interkin3tic]

If they think they're going to sell CDs in this day and age, they're idiots who should not be allowed to handle money. No, this is one middleman trying to squeeze every last penny they can from the next middleman.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[interkin3tic]

Having a fiscal duty to make their shareholders money doesn't change the ethics or ridiculousness of the situation. It simply explains what their goals are. They should still be shamed. You only point out that their shareholders should ALSO be shamed. Their "buisiness model" isn't under attack here anyway. The order songs play in isn't their business model.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[NJRoadfan]

Compilation albums of EDM can go two ways, mixed and unmixed tracks. If the tracks are continuously mixed by a DJ for MoS (very common), there could be a claim that they have some rights to that compilation. If its just a series of unmixed tracks (the original songs just thrown into a playlist) than there shouldn't be an issue.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[PhilHibbs]

It's not their music. They don't own the tracks. Are you suggesting that Spotify should ban any track that Ministry of Sound have licenced to include on a compilation album? This is the most popular music in the UK, that's why MoS put it on compilation albums. Spotify would be committing commercial suicide by banning that much music.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Oh for the love of all that was good in British music, that is very sad if Electronic Dance Music is the most popular now. What happened to the country that gave us the Beatles, the Who, Led Zeppelin, and even Blur? Sad, sad, sad.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[milkmage]

agreed

but still, this is user generated content.

Note to MoS.. those users are your FANS, you should encourage them to create playlists.

Re: Don't they have something better to do?

[jd2112]

It worked for Metalica didn't it?
Oh, wait. I haven't listened to a Metalica song (even on the radio) since those asshats started sueing their fans back in th Napster days.
And I'm sure that I'm not the only one.

Re:Don't they have something better to do?

[Half-pint HAL]

To clarify, if its just a list of songs, it shouldn't be a copyright problem, as in MoS has no copyright claim.

Not true -- UK copyright law has specific provisions to protect anthologies. It's termed "typographical arrangements". The idea is that if I spend a year compiling a book of medieval poetry (all individually out of copyright, obviously), I get a monopoly over the book as a collection, so no low-rent outfit can produce a cheap edition to undercut you and steal your market.

It's a good law, in that it implicitly recognised that an anthology deserves less protection than a truly original work: the term is restricted to 25 years from first publication.

What I don't know is if anyone has established by legal precedent whether a compilation CD is considered a typographical arrangement or not, but that will be the crux of Ministry of Sound's case.

Does the order matter?

[xaxa]

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...)

Re:Does the order matter?

[pegr]

Well, the recent Google/Oracle case pretty much decided that "Structure, sequence, and organization" is not a copyrightable element of Java. Why would it be copyrightable in this case?

Re:Does the order matter?

[Inda]

I went there before it was popular. Twice! And I regret it. Twice!

It was all about owning the most expensive shirt when, at the time, everyone in the scene was wearing jeans, t-shirts and trainers.

When MoS champion themselves as music heros, I wince.

Re:Does the order matter?

[Dogtanian]

I went [to the Ministry of Sound club] before it was popular. Twice! And I regret it. Twice! It was all about owning the most expensive shirt when, at the time, everyone in the scene was wearing jeans, t-shirts and trainers.

Doesn't surprise me. The Ministry of Sound was a major part of the corporate appropriation and commercialisation of the UK dance music scene. It rose to prominence around the same time (early to mid 90s) that the Tories were trying to outlaw the "underground" egalitarian Ecstasy-related house music and rave culture that had taken off here in the late 1980s- via the likes of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (with its infamous "repetitive beats" definition)- and the "superclubs" like them were on the rise.

Shouldn't be surprising that MoS was founded and owned by James Palumbo, a privileged, Eton-educated son of a Conservative peer, then.

To be fair, I never liked most Ecstasy-related dance music full stop and wasn't into that culture, but I could respect some of that early stuff for its energy as a youth culture. MoS et al, OTOH, seems to be responsible for the endless, life-sapping, unoriginal recycled "heard it before 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago and it was toss then" stagnated chart fodder we still have today.

List Copywrites

[x6060]

I can now copywrite my grocery list? Sweet!

Re:List Copywrites

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I'll have to buy my milk after my eggs or I might get sued

Re:List Copywrites

[i kan reed]

Sorry, I hold a patent on the dairy-after-eggs business process.

Re:List Copywrites

[PerlPunk]

I can now copywrite my grocery list? Sweet!

You can copyedit it, too.

Re:List Copywrites

[JustOK]

But which is first? chicken or eggs?

Glorified mixtapes

[TheP4st]

FTA:

"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?

Re:Glorified mixtapes

[AmiMoJo]

To be fair people are naming their playlists after the albums they re-created, so it appears that there is some small value in the ordering otherwise why bother to mention where you copied it from?

It's still stupid of course.

Re:Glorified mixtapes

[Bob9113]

Seriously, how much research does selecting 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 take it you're not a DJ. I don't know if Ministry of Sound UK is building solid sets or not (I actually have a few of their compilations, but haven't listened to them for structure), but the difference between a professional set and a mix tape is like the difference between a well designed database and the chaotic crap-fest data-dump that front-end programmers hack together when they're prototyping. A good set can take many hours to build and gets refined over months, or even years.

Bläurg

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Typographical settings

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

They have tried this before

[TAZ6416]

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..

Re:No soup.

[idontgno]

You're thinking Feist v. Rural. That US Supreme Court judgement held that simply collecting and unoriginally arranging mere information wasn't sufficiently creative to constitute a copyrightable work.

However, this is a UK suit. Feist isn't precedent. Also, it appears that the rest of the world (outside of the US) seems more friendly to the idea of copyrightable collections: the EU "database right" (and more specifically implemented in the UK by the The Copyright and Rights in Databases Regulations 1997); the explicit language in the Berne Convention supporing the copyrightability of collections (Article 2, section 5); and the corresponding wording in the GATT Uruguay Round Treaty Agreement, specifically in the TRIPS Agreement.

So, Feist appears to be an exception, not the rule.

Re:music is a list of notes

[MightyYar]

Yeah, try that defense :)

As a side note, I certainly hope you aren't looking for logic in copyright law!