RIAA is suing Project PlayList. RIAA claims that “Project Playlist performs and reproduces Plaintiffs’ valuable works (and induces and enables others to do so) without any authorization whatsoever and without paying any compensation whatsoever.”
Project playlist allows users to build playlist and share them through social networks such as mySpace. In fact, project playlist does not store any songs. They offer a search tool that proposes only contents that are found on Internet public sites. Here is the description of their music search engine:
Our internet search engine allows you to locate media files that are freely available on the world wide web. The listings in our search engine are automatically gathered from music blogs, trade-friendly concert archives, artist websites, record label websites and other public sources. In addition to automatic gathering, we accept submissions to our search engine by our users.…
Unfortunately, being available on web sites does not mean copyright free. Sources such as blogs are for instance often not extremely regarding about copyright. Thus, when giving access to the hosting site of the link, project playlist displays a banner with legal notices.
Below is the website (http://xxx.xxx/) containing the music file. Some music files located in this site may be subject to copyright. To be safe, don’t download from this site. If you like it, click here to download from iTunes or you can download the ringtone!
The page about copyright notices is extremely interesting to read. Some extracts:
– Project Playlist, Inc. aspires to index and organize the music on the Internet in a responsible and efficient manner, and is therefore committed to copyright protection.…
– The creators and publishers of the songs you hear through project playlist.com or our embedded music player, are being paid a royalty for their work if they are members of ASCAP, BMI or SESAC or any one of over 125 other PSOs that represent songwriters and music publishers around the world. The more a song is included on our users’ playlists, the more royalties the writer and publisher of that song are paid by Project Playlist, Inc. …
– Our users are also allowed to post URLs of music files that they discover on the Internet. Our Terms of Use Agreement prohibits a user from posting a link to a music file that the user knows is not posted by the artist, record label, a music blogger or other third party for promotional or other legal uses.…
Will it be sufficient for RIAA? Wait and see.