Court Rules Playlist Customization Is Not Interactive

prostoalex writes "Is music played via customized playlist delivered interactively (i.e., via user participation) or non-interactive (i.e., decisions are made on the server side)? The question does seem metaphysical, but it took Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Yahoo! six years to figure it out via a protracted legal battle. User-driven playlists are bucketed with on-demand music services, while server-driven playlists are equaled to broadcasts, thereby causing different licensing mechanisms to take place. Yahoo! inherited the legal wrangle when it purchased a music startup Launch, which built a music recommendation feature. The court decision determined that recommendation algorithms that rely on usage data to build playlists server-side are still eligible for broadcast license, thereby substantially lowering the costs of operating a music recommendation site."

What the stewardship of copyrights should mean

[zuki]

When reading these types of thread about the record business special interest group finding ways to bend the law, I find something very depressing about the fact that those who are supposed to be in charge of the 'stewardship' of copyrights seem to be doing everything in their power to make sure that a lot of the music they own doesn't ever get exposed, and since nobody will ever know about it, that it'll never sell. But actually, there are a lot of music lovers out there donating their time to upload torrents of many obscure records which haven't been in print for a great many years, and most likely will never be made available commercially again... and in the same fashion there are also any who contribute to projects such as Pandora and Last.fm

So against all odds, and no matter the Kafka-esque hurdles these people are trying to put up at every possible moment, it is still comforting to know that despite their best efforts to muzzle non-top 40 music, a lot of it will survive because there are many others out there who care about it quite deeply, not for money, but out of LOVE, and because it is part of our cultural heritage.

And in some way it is comforting to think that after putting out so much negative energy, bad vibes, and consistently having so few innovative ideas or vision on what is really needed in today's marketplace to make artists sell some records, (besides suing the pants out of everyone they can) the very people responsible for lobbying for all of this arguably short-sighted legislation are going to get what's coming to them, i.e.: the opportunity to re-tool and learn a new trade very soon.

It's kind of futile to argue against a tidal wave; it's what this particular situation reminds me of.

In the meantime, and until this takes place, there is no question that if I had a Net radio show or anything of that sort, I'd make sure that the servers streaming it are hosted somewhere which cannot be impacted by any such legislative measures.

Z.

Re:I wonder... why the price difference?

[KnyJG]

Obviously music of your choosing is more worth to you than music other people choose (ignoring the time spent doing the choosing part). Basically if you can say you would rather have one over the other there is a difference in value to you. Of course this story is about using usage statistics to build playlists, which is something in between "no influence" standard radio and DIY total control music, which you would get for instance from iTunes if you paid for all the songs played.The record industry wants you to pay for this added value, which is not different from any other industry. For instance you are probably paying extra to have HD channels rather than normal channels, or other similar scenarios.

In my opinion this is not a story of an evil, greedy record industry (even though I definitely believe that other news tell this story very well), but rather a normal legal battle over some specific part of a contract between two companies. Yahoo! would rather not pay extra, the record industry would like Yahoo! to do so. The only problem is that the contract is not precise enough to determine who is right without a judge looking it over.

Why did we need 6 years of lawyer's fees?

[Morgaine]

The world is turning into something out of a low-budget SciFi episode, a planet overrun by procedural paper pushers defining the physical world by legal statute. Sadly, it's not fiction, and we have no heroes to save the day.

The vast majority of good legal decisions are either "obvious" to anyone moderately sane (eg. dealing with an observed killing), or else they're shrouded in complexity that makes no single outcome fully just.

The first type needs nothing more than recourse to a "Fair Witness" (Heinlein's term, but there's some of it in the Jedi concept too, minus fighting), a person whose reputation is based on objectivity and fairness and plain commonsense -- no need for technicalities and legal dickering to come into it at all, by the definition of "obvious". A societal judge without court and with only one Law, simple fairness.

And the second type is handled equally well by the roll of a die --- after all, no single outcome is just. And dice do have the benefit of statistical fairness, which is more than can be said for the legal process where alleged "fairness" depends on your ability to afford good legal representation.

There is something fundamentally flawed in a system where years of arguing are considered to somehow yield justice, as if the cost didn't matter and the time lost meant nothing. Even if all costs were met uniformly out of the public purse, this still would not address the sheer deep freeze that legal proceedings place on society. Time is our most precious commodity, yet as this example showed, this is totally unappreciated in law.

Be that as it may, the current situation is nothing short of appalling, and getting steadily worse. We need a sort of French Revolution to lop off the heads of this new legal aristocracy, but I don't see that happenning --- we're stuck with this mess for the forseeable future, or at least as long as we're tied to this planet. Woes.