Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Is facilitating playable search copyright infringement?

This suit, although not without interesting a story line behind it, is important to watch because of the implications of the outcome. EMI is suing Seeqpod because it is a service that points users to music that is playable. Seeqpod does not host the files. From a technical breakdown, some judge is going to have to decide whether there is a distinction between indexing meta data (including where a file is hosted and what the file type is) and presenting that index to a user base and where does copyright infringement begin and end? Further grey area is how that presentation is packaged, which in Seeqpod's case where it has a player-like UI, does make it look like much more of a facilitator than say Google search results.

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