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Cases like this are frustrating. Spotify should NOT be able to stream any artist they want without paying them. But the judge said that’s OK because the victims waited too long to complain. The judge also said it’s totally OK that Spotify doesn’t have a list of what is legal for them to stream, simply because the list is constantly changing. This isn’t a paper list typed out by some secretary. This is a computer database that can be checked a thousand times a second.
There’s also the fact that who was the actual copyright holder was questionable and changed hands during the whole thing, so nobody knew who they should be contracting with.
That list issue you mentioned really confused me, so here’s what’s in the article about it:
The judge also noted that Spotify’s agreement with Kobalt did not include a database of the songs it could, and could not, stream.
“Kobalt’s primary stated reason for that approach is that the catalogue of a large administrator like Kobalt would be routinely changing, rendering any list almost immediately out of date,” she wrote.
So…
- It’s not Spotify who’s behaving weirdly here but the rights holder and
- the judge doesn’t just seem to be okay with it, but this is mentioned as another thing that added to the impression that the rights holder made it deliberately hard for Spotify to properly determine if it had the rights to stream a song.
Yes, but there is no technical justification for Spotify to not have real-time, remote access to a database, even if the database is constantly changing. We have had the technology to do that for 25 years. If Spotify is not properly handling the contracts to legally stream content, then some of the fault lays with them. Spotify is basically claiming their defense is ignorance. They can’t be held liable because they didn’t know what they could and couldn’t stream. How is that a legal justification for breaking the law? And Kobalt’s reasons for not letting Spotify know is also dumb.
How is Spotify supposed to “handle” anything here if the rights owner tells them that this is how it works? Like, not only didn’t the first rights owner give them any means to stay updated with the rights, the new rights owner didn’t notify them either that any rights were transferred to them before taking them to court. The only way to properly handle this would have been to tell them to get fucked, but that’s not really an alternative if we’re talking about the streaming rights for Eminem. This all seems like a setup to sue them… But who am I to tell? I’m just a jerk who read an article online. You know who should decide whether or not this was a scheme to drag Spotify to court? A judge.
Oh, wait, they did. Guess it’s decided, then.
Story sounds like vultures fighting over a carcass.
Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme…
And that’s how the next wave of music piracy started kids.
I was there when Microsoft COFEE released on WhatCD. And it appears I’ll be there when the certain villains’s coke party released on RED.
That being said, I left Spotify after 18 years recently because my money wasn’t going to artists I listen anyway. Bandcamp + SoulSeek + Lidarr is the way.
That story is genuinely hilarious. And from the judges summary judgement it really does sound like the license holder of the disputed songs did some legal juggling just to be able to play the victim and sue Spotify. What an odd business plan…
Article states if there were any wrong found it would be up to the company they employ to collect payments instead of the actual company that owes them. Fuck home state of Tennessee.
