Spotify sued over user playlists, said to infringe copyright

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British dance music label Ministry of Sound (MoS) has filed a lawsuit against Spotify. MoS claims that by hosting playlists that mimic tracklists on its collections, Spotify has violated UK copyright law.

The dance music record label sells collections like "The Sound of Dubstep Classics" and "Ibiza Annual 13." MoS doesn't own the music on the CDs it sells; it licenses them from others. However, the company is now arguing that its actual track listings are creative works worthy of copyright protection. It's an extraordinary claim, not too different from claiming a copyright over something like a simple list of one's own favorite songs.

"What we do is a lot more than putting playlists together," MoS CEO Lohan Presencer told The Guardian. "A lot of research goes into creating our compilation albums and the intellectual property involved in that. It's not appropriate for someone to just cut and paste them."

Spotify declined to comment on the lawsuit, which was filed on Monday in the UK High Court. MoS is seeking damages and an injunction removing certain Spotify playlists. Presencer said his company has been asking Spotify to remove those playlists, some of which have "Ministry of Sound" in the titles, since 2012.

Users of Spotify have created more than one billion playlists since it was launched in Europe in 2008. The company launched a new "Browse" feature last month to make it easier for users to discover each others' playlists.

"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," added Presencer.

In the US, a famous 1991 copyright case called Feist v. Rural ruled that it was permissible for one telephone book company to copy another's listings, no matter how much work went into compiling them. However, that was because the listings were rote compilations. The bar for creativity in US copyright law is low, and if MoS could successfully argue that its track selections required even a modicum of creative input, the lists probably would be protected.

Source: arstechnica.com