Hi all, <interest only, no actual useful advice contained>
We used to get loads of these. We hosted the now defunct We7/Blinkbox Music/Guvera and were genuinely streaming free copies of every single piece of recorded music. We'd frequently get attacked by an Angry Lawyer who was blissfully unaware that $tiny_artist_you've_never_heard_of had sold the rights for one track for a compilation to a different record label who went bust and was bought out by a third etc. etc. etc. until someone somewhere claimed they did have the digital rights and this was legal after all. It was fascinating to be involved in, they employed a handful of people to work out how to make a nice application for playing music and a vast number of people to work out how to do it legally and to apply progressively more exciting cost minimisation solutions that result in questions like... (i) if a track is pre-cached on the client and never played do you still have to pay for it (ii) if you have four identical tracks with different streaming prices, and your deduplicating filesystem reduces them to a single copy and you stream it, which rate of royalties should you pay? (iii) if the record company lawyers are a bit slow and don't renew any of your contracts, can you still stream under the old ones and assume that continuing to pay made it all okay? (iv) is there actually an upper bound to the number of different recordings of Puff The Magic Dragon? Mostly we forwarded the legal-shit-o-grams to the end client and let their team of lawyers be rude on our behalf. </end anecdote> Pete -- Pete Stevens [email protected] http://www.ex-parrot.com/~pete/ The last time humans crossed space to a destination was the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. In the 32 years since, no man has seen, with his own eyes, Earth as that beautiful, solitary blue sphere, and - reality check - no woman has ever seen it at all. -- James Cameron
