Re: music playlists

From: Benedict O'Mahoney <benedict[_at_]copyrightwebsite.com>
Date: Thu, 31 Mar 2005 16:05:00 -0500

I think if you were taking playlists and copying them to your site, you might have a problem relying on Feist, since some playlists are compiled based on more than alphabetical listings, such as genre (rock, electronica, etc), and further, some are based on someone's judgment about quality, and would therefore probably qualify for protection as a compilation.

However, the use you posit may still be viable. This seems analogous to what Google does. Their spider scrapes websites for links, including link lists. They populate their database with that information, from which they make inferences about how popular related sites are based on aggregated information.

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  Benedict O'Mahoney
  www.benedict.com
  benedict[_at_]benedict.com

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-----Original Message-----
From: "Webb, Jere" <JMWEBB[_at_]stoel.com>
To: "CNI-COPYRIGHT -- Copyright & Intellectual Property" <CNI-COPYRIGHT[_at_]cni.org>
Date: Wed, 30 Mar 2005 17:55:47 -0500
Subject: [CNI-(C)] music playlists

Client operates an online music site where you can browse songs, add tracks to your play list, and get suggestions for songs you might be interested in.  Copyright permissions are obtained. Client proposes to have a bot "scrape" play lists from other music websites (these are all over the web). They would not be published or distributed in any way, but would merely go into a database that would be used to analyze affinities or likely interests of listeners. Then when you go to the site you will get suggestions on music that might be of interest to you, much like amazon does with books. The question is, does anybody think these play lists enjoy any copyright protection. I conclude that they do not. No matter how creative the selection process may be, the expression is just an an alphabetical list and therefore covered by Feist v. Rural Communications (holding the white pages of telephone book not subject to copyright protection and rejecting the "sweat of the brow" theory of protection).  

Any thoughts, cases etc, relevant to this issue.?  

 I am aware that my client may need to be concerned about website terms and conditions, which sometimes impose restrictions beyond what is protected by copyrights.     Received on Fri Apr 01 2005 - 02:05:00 GMT