Let's do the best music player/downloader ever!

[carlosgs91]

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[soltanis]

Problem is writing this kind of program is not legal in the United States thanks to one of the most retarded laws ever written (oh is saying that illegal?) called the DMCA.

In order to license this kind of stuff you have to literally hemorrhage money, and the fees are pretty outrageous (they recently got a little better but not by much). It's too bad music webcasting is not covered by the same rules as terrestrial broadcasting. They get it pretty easy.

Offering music on demand to users would just be, wow. A lot of money flying down a hole. And absolutely no return if it were free.

[carlosgs91]

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[soltanis]

EDIT:
So the DMCA prohibits two things here:

• The act of circumventing copy protection/copyright
• Distributing tools or technologies that allow for the circumvention of copy protection/copyright

In general, US Courts have unfortunately interpreted this rather broadly. One of the most widely known (ab)uses of this law was to outlaw the distribution of the DeCSS program, as well as compromised encryption keys, that could decrypt DVDs so that people with Linux could actually, I dunno, watch the DVD they paid for.

[nvteighen]

What if the project is not hosted in the USA?

That's one of the current questions in "Internet Law". Under what jurisdiction should activities done through the internet be considered, under the server's or the user's or both's? Not being a lawyer myself (though having attended some Law classes because of interest), it's possible that each case requires a different answer for this...

Spain has the weirdest Copyright Law in the whole world. Anything is legal unless you earn money and the way you do it doesn't affect the copyright holder's economic interests... stupidly enough, this Law makes the GPL completely useless as you can redistribute Free Software without its source as long as it's free as beer... But you also have to count on the "other" part of the Law, which is that if the copyright holder believes that he's losing money because of your activities, you have to pay to him... and currently, this clause is interpret in a very broad way and there you have these days SGAE (a guild of editors and authors) wanting to be paid for the music played in weddings, etc... So, maybe it isn't even legal in Spain...

Currently, there's an important ruling from a court in Barcelona declaring P2P legal; sadly, I don't remember if it was a first or second instance court. SGAE will surely challenge the ruling up to the Tribunal Supremo (Supreme Court), where I hope this gets finally clarified for once in Spain. (It's better to have a bad law than having no idea what the law actually is...)

But again, using such a program wouldn't be legal in the USA and the rest of the world...

[carlosgs91]

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[wojox]

You mean something like lastfmripper? Used on Last.FM?

[nvteighen]

It's different in Spain, it's completely legal to share copyright music, videos and games (though i think that programs not).

The point is that if you don't share much files you don't have problems, but if you have a big webpage they can take you to a court. If you don't have money you loose, but if you have time and can pay a attorney you're done, as it's completely legal. Right now all the people who went to these courts won against SGAE.

So right now the SGAE is trying to modify the law in order to win, they want to be them who judge instead of a judge which is illegal as it would go against constitution, but they have money, politicians are corrupted and blabla.

Look at this: http://songr.co.cc/ I would like to make something similar to this, but open-source and with the ability to listen to music as you can do in Spotify.

Hm... you seem more informed than me ... despite both living in the same country

Ok, I thought SGAE had won some court cases on the basis of "interface of economic interests". I see now that's just the argument they use, not the actual ruling of any court. Thanks!

Anyway, outside Spain, this would be illegal for sure.

[carlosgs91]

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[roccivic]

How about broadcasting music over VOIP? So that people dial-into a stream. Then select something via DTMF, the server decodes the message and plays appropriate content.

Would DMCA be still all over you then (not that it's relevant to me)?

Peace

P.S.: Moving to Spain actually sounds easier