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the catalogue of a large administrator like Kobalt would be routinely changing, rendering any list almost immediately out of date,” she wrote.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.
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:
So…