Legality Issues

Hey guys,

I'm in the process of creating a music site.

I've done quite a bit of googling but don't even really know where to start searching, so I'm going to hope some of you have a little bit of knowledge in this area. What exactly are the terms of legality for music sharing? If I allow users to upload and share music on my website (I wouldn't provide any files), would it be illegal for me? If not, how would I go about making it legal? And how could I go about making it legal for me to provide some music as well? Otherwise, would I just have to force each user to upload their own music to play?

Any knowledge is useful.

Thanks!
Dan

The whole issue is to do with copyright and who owns it. If you are provided a facility for people to share music you have an obligation to ensure they are not "illegally" sharing music (see the recent case where kazaa had to pay, I think, in the region of $100m to the music industry Link)

If someone uploads, say a song by Madonna (and it's not the legal owner of the copyright), by providing a facility for others to download this music, I assume the precedent of the Kazaa case, is that you would be liable for breach of copyright.

Even if you are able to trace who uploaded this track, you would then face the task of taking them to court for not agreeing to the Terms and Conditions of the site (which I assume would include not uploading tracks you do not own the copyright of) Short of previewing all uploaded tracks prior to issuing them, I can't see a way round it.

If you want to legally sell copywritten tracks, you would have to pay a royalty for each track you provide / sell.

That would be my understanding from a very non-legal background!!!

Hope it helps.

Thanks richy. I was afraid that's what I'd see. I still kind of want to know for sure if I would be held liable in such a situation. Possibly I could track which user uploaded which music file in that case.

The last thing you touched on I'm curious about too. What would be the details of paying for each song? I'm assuming it would be a serious arm and a leg. :?

I don't honestly know the legal ins and outs of it, but if your site allows users to download copyrighted material I'm guessing the first person the music industry would come after is you.

I think you'd also be in a difficult position saying "How can I know what people are uploading?" or "It's OK. This person uploaded your copyrighted material to my server. Go after them". If the music is stored on your server, you'll be the one responsible for it.

In terms of licensing, I don't know much about it. A quick google search brought this up. Might be a good place to start.

Hope that helps. Like I say, I'm no legal expert, but it's hot topic at the moment. Anybody holding illegal copyrighted music is fair game for the music industry and if someone's uploading it to your server, I guess you'll be fair game too.

good points, double r...plus...they would most likely go after the deeper pockets...like the company hosting the services...

I say we get everyone to create a similar site. We find out the email addresses of everyone in the RIAA we can. Then whenever someone uploads a file to one of our websites, we auto-send them an email asking them to verify if they have a copyright on the file. Tell them they have 30 days to reply or it will be assumed that they have no copyright. Even give them easy "yes/no" hyperlinks in the email to allow them to easily reply. The email would need a link to the file in question, and it would be pointed out that this file is only available to them until they review it, or the time limit expires.

Then, when we've got 10 or so similar web sites, we start spamming them with files. Copyrighted files. Public files. Fake files. You name it. Post blogs about it, put up myspace users for the sites. Get it out there fast.

They can't sue us, because we're not providing it to others. We're only hosting it long enough to allow them to review it to see if they have a copyright on it. How else are we to know what has a copyright and what doesn't? If they're going to enforce thier copyrights, they have to have a mechanism to allow us to verify files.

Anyways, sorry about the slightly-off topicity of this post. It's friday afternoon, and everything is tangental.