license issues?

[Christoph8372]

Recently i stumbled upon the licensing issues concerning Amarok and the
LyricWiki API. There the music industry forbid Amarok to fetch the
lyrics via Amarok s API. (I now use a different Amarok script to do
that? Maybe I m doing something wrong here, I never got past that point)

Now I questioned if something similar would be possible for Musicbrainz
aswell. I wondered of which information Musicbrainz provides you can be
sure to use legally also in the future. I mean, could it possibly be
that the industry forbids to fetch artist and album information for
picard in the same way? Or could it be that certain pieces of
information have to be restricted, like the length of a certain song, an
information about which kind of album release the music is contained
in, ... ?
>From my understanding of legal rights the licenses given in
http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzLicense
do not protect Musicbrainz from harms done by the music industries.
The license protects Musicbrainz from uses of third parties, e.g. I
can't download all the stuff presented and sue Musicbrainz :P

 I thought the music industry posesses full rights on the music and may
grant rights to whatever extend they wish. Recently they decided that
they forbid lyricwiki api, maybe tomorrow ...

It would be very annoying if you spent so much time developing and
suddenly someone comes and claims that you have to pay money to use
Musicbrainz.

Christoph


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On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 1:07 PM, Christoph Geißinger <geissinger@...> wrote:

> Recently i stumbled upon the licensing issues concerning Amarok and the
> LyricWiki API. There the music industry forbid Amarok to fetch the
> lyrics via Amarok s API. (I now use a different Amarok script to do
> that? Maybe I m doing something wrong here, I never got past that point)
>
> Now I questioned if something similar would be possible for Musicbrainz
> aswell. I wondered of which information Musicbrainz provides you can be
> sure to use legally also in the future. I mean, could it possibly be
> that the industry forbids to fetch artist and album information for
> picard in the same way? Or could it be that certain pieces of
> information have to be restricted, like the length of a certain song, an
> information about which kind of album release the music is contained
> in, ... ?
> >From my understanding of legal rights the licenses given in
> http://musicbrainz.org/doc/MusicBrainzLicense
> do not protect Musicbrainz from harms done by the music industries.
> The license protects Musicbrainz from uses of third parties, e.g. I
> can't download all the stuff presented and sue Musicbrainz :P
>
>  I thought the music industry posesses full rights on the music and may
> grant rights to whatever extend they wish. Recently they decided that
> they forbid lyricwiki api, maybe tomorrow ...

What MusicBrainz collects is public knowledge, which can't be
copyrighted in most (all?) countries, not the music. You can copyright
the collection/database of knowledge (such as MB), but that part is
described on the page you linked.

--
Lukas Lalinsky
lalinsky@...

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[Robert Kaye]

On Sep 9, 2009, at 4:07 AM, Christoph Geißinger wrote:

> It would be very annoying if you spent so much time developing and
> suddenly someone comes and claims that you have to pay money to use
> Musicbrainz.


Fortunately this isn't a problem. MusicBrainz has always been very  
careful about copyright issues to ensure that we don't get caught in  
situations like what you describe. Factual metadata is fully in the  
clear here in the US where the project is hosted and legally  
incorporated.

--

--ruaok      A village in Texas has its idiot back!

Robert Kaye     --     rob@...     --    http://mayhem-chaos.net


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