Ministry of Sound sues Spotify over user playlists Dance music empire the Ministry of Sound is suing music streaming service Spotify to protect the value of its compilation albums, in an unusual test case of European intellectual property law. The legendary clubbing empire launched proceedings in the UK High Court on Monday. It wants an injunction requiring Spotify to remove …
Funny you should say that - one of my friends used to live a flat above one of the Ministry's senior employees. She claims to have attended a house party where there was the old rock-and-roll cliche of a model railway with trains transporting something that looked remarkably like salt.
Here's the obvious follow up:
Will I be sued by Amazon for putting my Discworld collection into the same order on my bookshelf that they have it in the store: The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort and so on?
What about your movies: Prometheus, Alien, Aliens . . .
Is it now protectable to have an order that makes sense? If it doesn't need to make sense, where does that put the quality of MoS's compilations?
About the only thing that MoS can do is complain about trademark infringement, and that's weak as it isn't Spotify that is naming them. The idea of a playlist of hits predates them by quite some time (the Now That's What I Call Music series of compilation discs date back to 1983 for example), I suspect that this is another example of an industry killed by the digital revolution but yet to work this out.
Having never listened to a MoS compilation, can somebody confirm if they attempt to mix or beat-match each track, or are they simply playing each track in sequence? If the former, I would say that no breach of copyright has occurred, as their IP is around the mixing, not around the order of tracks.
Yup. I can confirm this. They do mix---I just checked a few of the MoS albums I have in my collection. That being so, I fail to see how they even have a case. If users are allowed to comment on spotify tracklists, they'd be much better off commenting on the playlists themselves. Something along the lines of "this is not a MoS album. The real album has different remixes of some tracks than are listed here and it's professionally mixed so that one track leads seamlessly into the next. If you want to hear this the way it was intended to be heard, then go and buy the album". Surely a much more sane/rational approach.
I notice that this is not the first time that MoS has sued someone over something that they may or may not have just grounds for. Google turned up quite a few hits for previous cases (just use "-spotify" to eliminate the current case). They may claim to be "down with the youth", but their behaviour is pure corporatism.
Spotify needs to release a plugin called "auto-mix" to do the job for any playlist to really wind MoS up. It's not hard, a quick frequency analysis to get the bpm of neighbouring tracks, and then a simple calculation to get the relative playing speeds. Ramp them in/out and Bob's your uncle. Might sound a bit s*it compared to a professional DJ who knows the intro/outro sequences a bit better, but an easy first cut. You could even have tunable lengths for mixing in/out for each track.
There was some fella on Dragons Den a while back who claimed to have patented the above, effectively, but I had my doubts about the value of that when he presented it as it's just some moderately simple maths.
I've often wondered about making something like this to ensure I get tunes to a beat I can run to.
MoS do add 'value' by segueing the tracks into each other; but as you're not going to get the mixing when you just slap the individual songs into a playlist I can't see what possible reason they can have to bitch about anything.
Thrown out of court, possibly with a "Stop wasting our fucking time" fine would be my guess.
The USP of MoS compilations was more accessibility: at one time, many of the tracks would have been vinyl only, and possibly available in very limited quantities.
Now the original artists are quids-in as they're getting remunerated for their plays whereas MoS is getting nothing.
@Bill the Sys Admin 14:50
I guarantee you've never listened to a (genuine) MoS CD then.
Although like others I fail to see a legal infringement here. Playlist without the mix is *not* a MoS product, so what if someone decides to call their playlist MoS Ibiza Chillout? It's gonna sound cr** compared to the real deal and I doubt Spotify has access to some of the mixes that MoS have.
Good publicity for MoS in their 22nd birthday year though....
@McToo
"I doubt Spotify has access to some of the mixes that MoS hav"
Correct, at least for chilled house.
That's a good get-out for Spotify though; just look up every MoS compilation tracklist, ensure at least one random remix is unavailable from each one and presto, problem solved.
@Goldmember
"That's a good get-out for Spotify though; just look up every MoS compilation tracklist, ensure at least one random remix is unavailable from each one and presto, problem solved."
I disagree. If its a 12 track album, 11 of the artists made a deal with spotify to release their work, the 12th artist was busy creating a new album so didn't want to deal with lawyers ... and when they come to spotify with their latest album + the rest of their work they're not allowed to release their complete works on there because of that ruling in court? Punishing someone for being last isn't a solution.
I have their 80s Electronic Anthems and they're not mixed. So technically, they could claim that they've put the effort into researching which songs to pull together to create the compilation but that's as far as their effort has gone.
I wish I'd copyrighted some of my old mix tapes from the good old days. Oh hang on...
@Neil Porter
Having seen it done, albeit at a different label, the 'research' isn't into the quality of the tracks, its over the licensing fees and conditions to have the handful of tracks you actually want on something you can sell.
The owners with in demand tracks do plenty of 'If you want that track it'll be £££s, and you'll also have to have this track for the same money. Yes, we know it's crap, but it's take it or leave it'.
On the whole yes MOS albums are mixed. Some of them even come with two CDs, one with the tracks individually and the other with tracks mixed together. Also they do a fair bit of work deciding what tracks to put on the compilations and the order they should be played in so I can understand they are not happy when someone copies it. What they can do about it I don't know though..
Most MOS (other than singles of course) are mixed:
http://www.discogs.com/label/Ministry%20Of%20Sound?sort=date%2Casc
Not sure how they can claim that is the same as a Spotify playlist that is obviously not mixed. They may be going for some legal grounds such as "near enough to be damaging" so it will be interesting to see how that turns out.
That's a pretty good idea, thanks for bringing it to my attention. I just made a Chilled House playlist, great for the working day. And yes, I named it Ministry of Sound - Chilled House.
Maybe they'll have a claim for people using the name Ministry of Sound, but I doubt they'll specifically get anything for the order in which people decide to play tracks available on Spotify. Plus, I doubt there are many (if any) of their compilations where every single remixed version of every single track is actually available (there are about 5 or 6 missing from the one I just made), rendering the playlist different to their own anyway.
Right, but so what? How does that hurt or injure MOS?
What kind of business model did they really have? They license music and resell it in compilations. I can do the same thing without them by buying all the tracks and making a play list in iTunes. Or I could buy all the individual song's albums and make a mix-tape (unless British law prohibits this.)
To quote from the linked article:
... the largest part of our business comes from sales of compilation albums. ... [Spotify] does not recognise that our products have any material value. It doesn't consider them worth licensing.
They're really just mad that Spotify didn't want to double-license the same material and Presencer wants his pound of flesh.
So what - it is their brand. A brand they have been building and marketing for decades
And for the sake of argument, compiling a CD might not be the most strenuous job but you have to assume it still takes a fair amount of time for them to decide the songs to use and the ordering - real bands take ages sometimes doing the same on their albums after all. So while you coming up with the same order by chance is perfectly fine, deliberately copying their work is a bit dubious. Doing so and then distributing this USING their brand name seems a bit blatant.
I agree that the use of the trademarked name "Ministry of Sound" would be a copyright/trademark violation except that it is the end users that are naming the offending playlists, NOT Spotify who shouldn't be held accoutnable for users' decisions.
I will assume that MOS has some talent in making commercial mix tapes or they would have folded by now. It's perfectly fine to do what they do, but in all honesty they've not really produced anything "unique" IMO (at least not in the sense that the creators of the music they curated have done. But that's an entirely different debate anyway.)
You can share a playlist publically via Spotify - this is even the default behaviour in some circumstances. Which is great - there's a bloke who copies the 6Music weekly playlist and keeps it updated which I subscribe to. I don't think it makes a jot of difference seeing as it's still user generated content, but I am not a lawyer who could make a tidy profit arguing that point.
Probably the only legal avenue that they have is protection of their trademark which, in some jurisdictions, they are obliged to actively protect or lose.
Either way, you can only protect your trademark from use by other traders. It is not like copyright where everyone is covered. These users are not traders so I can't see how Ministry of Sound would have a case at all.
This post has been deleted by its author
So MOS are trying to sue spotify because I could create a playlist that recreates their collection of tracks by sourcing the tracks from either the original artist's singles or albums, some other publishers compilations or even tracks held on my own computer.
Given the amount of different club edits or mixes available for a given track the odds of me exactly replicating a MOS compilation are pretty slim.
if I then choose to call my playlist MOS ultimate collection (or whatever) then it is still none of their business UNTIL I share that playlist with others, about the only thing they can ask is that spotify prevent the sharing of playlists that exactly match their compilation names
Well perhaps if they employed some skilled DJs to actually mix the tracks together in a creative and imaginative way they would still have a unique selling point.
If a user can just stick a load of tracks together in the same order and get a comparable experience then frankly they aren't really offering much and they deserve to lose the business.
Since when has a simple list ever been protected under copyright?
This has squat to do with "digital technology eroding the rights of artists". There's a very real legal question here that has nothing to do with technology. Can you copyright a list? The answer to that should be NO in any decade. Tech should have nothing to do with it.
Not sure about EU/UK ideas in this regard though...
It's time I copyrighted the sound of my farts. Now, as they sound like those of everyone else, I should make a fortune!
This copyright business really is being taken to extreme. The honest person has to walk on eggshells for just about everything he now does on the web--everywhere one turns one is confronted with a copyright block of one kind or another.
It seems to me that if this trend continues with similar precedents then things will slowly grind to a halt, if not then the web will become a greyish bland. Perhaps it's time to call a halt to businesses that find holes in the law which restricts the freedoms of everyone else.
In the UK, if you record yourself farting into a microphone, you will own the copyright of that recording. Like wise if you recorded me farting, you'd still own the sound recording copyright.
If you went one stage further and farted out an original melody, you'd own not just the sound recording copyright, but the copyright of the fart based musical work too!
Or something like that! It's complicated and I'm not dull enough to understand it completely - I think the laws about music and copyright were written to screw the artist - or in this case, the fartist!
of the Post Office/BT claiming copyright in the phone book, even though it's just an ordered list of names. As I recall the court agreed that it could be protected by copyright, since the work had gone into to making it an original work.
Now I'm typing I think there was a company in the 80s who started scanning and OCRing phone books to provide their own database. This ruling stopped them dead (and incidentally removed any need for BT to then release an electronic phone book).
Apparently it takes a lot of skill and effort to put these tracks in the 'correct' order.
Skill that the Spotify users obviously have in abundance, since they seem to be producing similar works in their playlists and no-one has produced evidence to say they copied the track lists from the MoS albums. Even a computer could randomly make playlists that match MoS order, with no skill input whatsoever.
Of course, if the spotify users are stupid enough to copy the CD name as well....
But in the end, its the order of songs they are claiming copyright on. Which seems a little daft.
> order of songs they are claiming copyright on. Which seems a little daft.
Why? A book is just a long collection of pre-existing words in a different order. Although I suppose we can expect that any time now the EFF will deliver an amicus curiae brief suggesting that copyright on books is invalid because all the words have been used before, just in a different order and that constitues prior art...
He's good mates with Mandy Mandleson. Now didn't Mandy push through the Digital Economy Act ?
Reminds me of the Beatles song "With a Little Help from My Friends"
Probably get my ass sued now for listing the Beatles.
Reg can we have a pile of steaming dung icon for whenever we mention a politician ?
Let's say i ripped a CD to my PC. Let's say i called the file Bob Dylan - Blood On The Tracks, logically as per the CD and guess what, the tracks appear in the same order as on the original CD. What else should i call it? OK technically a breach of copyright, not that CBS have been in touch about it and probably never will.
What then pisses me off, is that Spotify rummage through all my files and music and next thing you know, all such files are listed on Spotify to magically make available and share with any like minded soul. They would do the same if i recorded myself singing in the bath, god forbid, and called it "Music to upset the dog and the neighbours" ie my copyright name.
That is what is wrong, why the hell should Spotify use that in their business model? Why do so many online sites think we want to share everything with the world?
It's a shame that the legal system can't produce two losing sides.
They have tried this before, tried to sue torrent downloaders but it turned out they were not actually suing over the music (because I assume they only licensed the music for the compilations and didn't own the copywrite) but the track listings - 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
It all went a bit horribly wrong for them and their lawyers - http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/news/revenge-attacks-take-down-lawyer-and-ministry-of-sound-10319
"But if copyright laws were used, how would MoS go about it? Copyright has become significantly weaker in the digital era, as the law has failed to keep pace with technology, eroding the ability of an individual to protect their property."
Can the reporter explain us how in the old days of the K7 and CD, the copyright was stronger in protecting property compared with the "digital era"?
Ministry of Shite are the Simon Cowell of house music. They've done their level best to destroy the genre with crude commercialisation, selling countless mixes of the same tired tracks to morons who'll buy them because there's a pretty girl on the advert and they want to be "cool".
In a just world, the perpetrators of this bile would have a 1210 dropped onto them from a great height.
"Spotify pays artists as little as 0.4p per stream, which means that a song that had a million plays would earn its performer just £4,000."
Read more at http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jul/20/spotify-radiohead-musicians-union-rights
At least MOS produce something. They have a label, release music, setup live concerts for their artists, promotion, pay DJs to research new music and mix it. Whether you like the scene or not you need to accept it doesn't all happen for free. You cant compare MOS to Now who just put together a compilation of the Top 40.
Spotify is not a radio station by the fact that you can choose what to listen to. The Spotify model just doesn't add up. They are out to make money out of streaming music whilst paying the minimum license they can.
"Sadly, the worst thing you can do? Listen to your favorite artists through the superlative music streaming service, Spotify:"
Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/38097/infographic-most-artists-earn-more-revenue-through-itunes-than-at-retail/#QK6qDawcD7FPfsmz.99
If you value electronic music buy from someone like Beatport or Juno and stop all this MOS bashing.
Nope. MOS produce and promote their own acts. Understandable really, considering they're a business who are in it to make money, like all labels. However, when they constantly churn out "classics" albums, all full of their own monotonous produce, ignoring most of the actual classics of the genres, then they lose their credibility. They even produced something for channel 4 a while back, again promoting themselves and their acts, claiming to have invented everything there is to do with house music.
It would be OK if the stuff they produced was actually any good, but with a few exceptions it's mostly formulaic crap.
""Spotify pays artists as little as 0.4p per stream, which means that a song that had a million plays would earn its performer just £4,000.""
True, and if the same recording of the same song is played on Radio 1 to 1 million listeners it earns the artist £50.
Difficult to see that Spotify is underpaying.
and how much of whatever they want paying would go the artists? none..
this is just another case of a redundant business trying to find extra profit and actually taking away from the musicians.
they can see the dollar signs rolling if every album on spotify not only needs licenses for the tracks but the track ordering, this is just testing the water to see if they can get away with such absurdity.
They can go and piss up a nylon rope... this is getting out of control. They think they can copyright the order that songs are played in?
I have no sympathy whatsoever for any of these copyright creeps anymore. I no longer respect imaginary property. So that's all they are accomplishing... desensitizing people to violating copyright, for you just cannot get away from it in some instances. People do it every time they bring a blaster to the park to have tunes, every time they sing "happy birthday" in front of a group of other people (and the original wasn't even happy birthday, but "good morning to you"), every time they watch a video on youtube etc.
I don't know how they can claim bugger all since all they do is s̶t̶e̶a̶l̶ licence other artists tracks from the various record companies. Mix them with some shitty beat match software and shove them out to idiots to buy. A fraction of which 'may' go back to the original artists if they are lucky.
Plus how many times are they going to re-release the SAME damned tracks on a 'new' compilation.
Everybody must have the same tracks at least 10 times over by now if they are mug enough to keep buying these crappy compilations.
They do re-release a lot granted but you are completely wrong when you say they don't have signed artists. They don't just licence, they have loads of signed artists and loads of real releases. They also have many sub labels that they use to release different genres and try out more underground stuff. I mean seriously they release some of the biggest dance tracks out there.
"Copyright has become significantly weaker in the digital era"
What nonsense. Copyright has been screwed down ever tighter, as corporation panic about their customers possibly using media in ways the copyright holders haven't explicitly authorised. Copyright has steadily become more and more onerous on the average citizen and IP laws have not followed the changing landscape of media use but instead have been extended to try to prop up a business model that is simply no longer viable in the digital age. Don't know what else I expected in an article by the biggest copyright apologist on The Reg.
"Everyone is talking about curation, but curation has been the cornerstone of our business for the last 20 years,"
Go tell it to the WWAA, the Wagon Wheel Association of America, or the KSSM (Kennedy Space Shuttle Mechanics).
Looks like it might be time to find a new business, just like all other entities that were made outdated by progress.
I'll agree about using your name, and even about the use of the acronym, but the contents of the playlists, you can stick that idea someplace dark. Companies and people that make claims like this should not only lose, they should be fined for wasting tax-payer resources.
Like the author of the article, I'm not sure copyright is the right way to go about this... As other commenters have pointed out, a playlist of tracks on spotify will not be the same as a properly mixed album. A list of tracks isn't too conceptually dissimilar to a recipe, and recipes aren't copyrightable.
I do note though, however, that purveyors of dodgy handbags etc. don't get to argue "it's OK, it's not as good as a real one" over a fake bag, so I'm not 100% convinced that its baseless.
As for passing off, that certainly looks more arguable.
Spotify attract users to their service with their big catalogue of music and with their social functionality, including playlist sharing. Some of those playlists are labelled as MoS despite having no affiliation, thus Spotify is getting some amount of benefit (albeit indirectly) from the wrongful use of the MoS name.
"But if copyright laws were used, how would MoS go about it? Copyright has become significantly weaker in the digital era, as the law has failed to keep pace with technology, eroding the ability of an individual to protect their property."
- I'd go further and venture that the rights to ones own material has been degrading ever since this new-fangled 'writing things down' came about...
ok, fair enough, at first everything was in latin and whatnot, so that people coudln't just read these books back on any person that they wanted (and so the industry of only passing information on orally was protected - Analogue Rights Management), but in the end people started to format-shift things about so that you could read one of these 'books' on any person... which meant that the big media companies couldn't dictate what kind of person you could read the book back on: freetardians could just buy a book once and read it as many times as they wanted.. no need to pay a story teller every time...and no one made a new story... ever again.
It has been a dark century or two for these media types indeed :(
...copyright, patents and rights for creative work will be given to the creator amounting to a term valid for 3x the time of the human effort that went into the creation, for example:
if you spend 20 years developing a fusion reactor then you assert rights over it for 60 years. (and serial, not parallel. Having 100 people work on it for 20 years does not give you 6000 years)
If you spend 3 years writing a novel, then you get to protect that work for 9 years.
If you spend 2 minutes creating a song playlist and then 1 day mixing them together, you can have 3 days and 6 minutes worth of protection.
Fair.
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