Ministry of Sound sues Spotify for copyright infringement
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Should they be able to protect that business through the use of copyright is an interesting problem. Is what they do valuable enough to warrant protection? Is it "art"? I don't think that's as straightforward a question as some people (on both sides of the argument) seem to think.
Yes. And since they (MoS) are obviously earning _something_ from selling their compilations there must be _some_ value in there. (I assume there are tracks from different labels on said compilations, otherwise they should just be happy about their Spotify revenue.)
> Is what they do valuable enough to warrant protection? Is it "art"?
It is a tough question, but answering with "yes" gets you on a slippery slope. Are MoS going to pay up if (by chance) a Spotify user made a playlist a month ago that exactly matches their next release?
In other words: not at all.
The question here is if a playlist is a creative work. I think it is - picking and ordering songs to create a larger work designed to illicit a response from the listener seems to be more than the dry recording of facts.
I am fairly anti-copyright in general and I think that this case illustrates a problem with modern copyright. Most people won't feel that such a small thing as a playlist deserves copyright protection because it is small, not because it lacks creativity. As far as I know, the law does not make such exceptions for "small" infringements.
If someone bought a bunch of prints of the same art, tacked it to some dry wall in the same layout and sold it at a flea market -- would it be copyright infringement? If they blatantly copy the name of the gallery as well, I'd argue it as trademark infringement -- not copyright infringement. But again, this is the UK. I'm only lay-familiar with US copyright.
Some would argue the Java API took an immense amount of creativity to build. Doesn't mean it's copyrightable.
Some would argue that a cake is a cake is a cake, others that it takes a great amount of creativity to create a truly amazing cake recipe. Still doesn't mean you can copyright a recipe.
Just because creativity is involved doesn't make something inherently copyrightable.
Was it copyright infringement?
svckr's post is:
> If there's no value to curation then people wouldn't bother copying the lists
Yes. And since they (MoS) are obviously earning _something_ from selling their
compilations there must be _some_ value in there. (I assume there are tracks
from different labels on said compilations, otherwise they should just be happy
about their Spotify revenue.)
> Is what they do valuable enough to warrant protection? Is it "art"?
It is a tough question, but answering with "yes" gets you on a slippery slope.
Are MoS going to pay up if (by chance) a Spotify user made a playlist a month
ago that exactly matches their next release?
But I'm getting tired of "old school" media companies trying to solve all their business problems by suing those who actually innovate the slightest.
Why not, for a change, try to embrace technology and see new opportunities? The music industry have been collaborating on their own grave since napster, and very much deserve to fall in it.
Mix the tracks together, re-release it to spotify and pay the artists x% of what you earn on the stream.
Good for me as a user since I can get curated & mixed content from a "trusted" source. Good for MoS since they get something for their effort. Good for the artist that can get exposure they otherwise would not get.
(that might not be perfect, but it took me 1 minute.. Old media, are you listening? You should hire me as a consultant since you obviously can't do this on your own ;)
What bothers me about their attitude is that this is not something Spotify wants, it obviously is something the _listeners_ want, and it seems like they don't give a damn about that. If they fail as a business, they well deserve it for refusing to adapt to their listeners' wishes. Instead, they want to force their listeners to adapt to _them_.
At the end of the day, whatever "innovation" happens with companies like Youtube or Spotify, they make their money selling someone else's creative works. Spotify could have the most innovative, awesome platform ever, and nobody would use it without the library of content provided by the "old school media companies." Indeed, in a way the Viacom lawsuit was a great thing for Youtube, because it helped pave the way for companies using it as a platform to deliver quality content instead of just being a host for cat videos.
So while I think it's true that the old school media companies need to embrace new technology, at the same time I think new school media technology companies need to accept that their sole revenue source is derived not from their "innovation" but other peoples' hard work. Those people that are creating the actual product will be justifiably protective of how media technology companies use their work.
Not that I necessarily disagree, but the exact same thing could be said about the media companies.
"I think new school media technology companies need to accept that their sole revenue source is derived not from their "innovation" but other peoples' hard work"
Again, it's the same with all media companies. Also, even if Spotify would be value-less without music it does not mean that they don't add any value.
It's not the basic transaction that's the problem. Aggregating and distributing other peoples' products is a valuable function. But Amazon doesn't go around complaining that its vendors don't give it all their products for free (so they can turn around and make piles of money reselling them).
What I have seen though are a lot of shade tactics from "old media" companies: suing, lobbying for censorship and generally lying about everything. Where I live they also have a habit of using the "poor artists" as meat-shield in public discussions and advertising. Of course that doesn't stop them from routinely fucking them over when it suits them.
Aanyway, it seems like Spotify is at least partly owned by "old media" so it's not so clear cut.
"If we don't step up and take some action against a service and users that are dismissing our curation skills as just a list, that opens up the floodgates to anybody who wants to copy what a curator is doing."
This is amazing. Finally someone admitting, very clearly in plain english that their curation business has been disrupted. I don't see how this can hold up in court, otherwise this will set a legal precedent for an untold amount of businesses in similar content curation industries.
I can see why they would see they have a case, but all they're doing is taking other artists songs, putting them on the CD and leveraging their well-known brand to sell copies. It's an old way of thinking, everyone is a content curator nowadays as this court case has proven.
Having said that a Ministry of Sound CD is usually always mixed. I doubt they have a case because you're not getting the tracks that have been mixed by MoS DJ's, they're suing based on track order and not so much the content which Spotify have legally paid for to stream.
There are some pretty good MoS compilations, even epic. They release also chillout, lounge and other electronica compilations, not only with club music.
The fact is that they are releasing a ton of compilations, so at the end of the day there's more quantity than quality, but I would't say that they are bad.
Plus I bet the artists get more royalties - in percentage - from MoS compilations they were featured on rather than from Spotify.
That's why I love 8tracks, you can find some really good playlists. But those playlists are not copies of some already made compilation (playlists shamelessly named the same as the ones from MoS). There's no artistic value in doing that.
And at the end of the day, a lot of people will be satisfied to listen to these compilations unmixed - instead of buying them from MoS.
http://www.ministryofsound.com/shop/product/music/41356/hed-...
Are we supposed to forget anything about them as soon as we close the page?
The fact that the tracks are listed on a website doesn't anymore inform your right to replicated it than the fact that words are arranged into an article on a website does it. Copying the latter is clearly not any more or less legal because it's on the web (as opposed to printed), so why would that argument apply to listing of tracks?
Look, I'm being pedantic. We don't appear to have any real difference of opinion. But the fact that something is published on a website doesn't give you any more copy-rights than if it was published in any other way (say, on the sleeve on a CD you bought). I don't see how that is a controversial observation.
[1] https://support.spotify.com/fi/learn-more/guides/#!/article/...
I would add this track (silence) to the end of my playlist https://play.spotify.com/track/3gCqAxfnSNxflYodkSOiFd
It seems their main complaint is that the playlists are named "Ministry of Sound" and made searchable by Spotify.
Personally, I land on the side of simply acknowledging that there are intellectual products that require plenty effort to produce and provide plenty of value but just simply shouldn't be protectable in every aspect. Sometimes, like it or not, the product of your hard work is a public good and the rest of us are just free riders. Accept it, be proud of what you did, enjoy your own opportunities to free ride, and find a different way to monetize. In this case, it's track listings, but I think the same should apply to software and UI paradigms.
I, for one, don't want to live in a Balkanized world where every conceivable idea and work is someone's property.
And this is UK law, so I'm not even going to speculate.
But this reeks of the Oracle v Google Java API copyright infringement suite.
MoS is suing over user-generated (and shared) playlists of these songs on Spotify, claiming copyright on the act of assembling a compilation.
I completely understand what they're suing over and what spotify has copyrighted vs. what MoS is claiming.
Of course, what they're claiming, the track listing on Wikipedia is probably infringing as well..
(ed. also: Spotify may have the permissions to stream the original, unmodified tracks - but when MoS puts together their compilations there is significant mixing and mastering that happens to modify the tracks from their original; so these aren't even the tracks from the MoS albums - just lists of the original tracks used to compile the MoS albums)