Songbeat Down
March 14th, 2009 Posted in Copyright, IP News
This blog post takes us on a short European vacation to Germany where Songbeat, a MP3 search and download application, was recently taken off the web.
The message on the homepage (www.songbeatplayer.com) reads “[s]o we have sent Songbeat away to enter the 36 Shaolin Chambers of Software Kung Fu. Once it has finished its training it will be back better than ever: faster, smoother, ans way more Kung Fu.” I imagine Songbeat’s proclamation engenders a Bruce Lee from Enter the Dragon, Chuck Norris in Lone Wolf, and a reinvigorated Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins all rolled together creating the perfect amalgam Asian martial arts.
So, Songbeat who? Songbeat is an computer application for playing a discovering music on the internet. It essentially allowed the user to scour the web for MP3’s using integrated search for Seeqpod, Project Playlist, SpoolFM, iASK and more, stream tracks and even download them. You could find as many tracks as you want, but you could only download 25 of them. An upgrade of the program would have cost you 20 Euro which would allow the user an unlimited amount of downloads.
When Tech Cruch (www.techcrunch.com) inquired with Songbeat regarding possible copyright infringement their response was as follows: “[t]he downloading of music is not fundamentally illegal. However, it lies in the hands of the user to discern whether or not they have the right to download the particular music file at hand.” A short time later, probably around the end of February, legal counsel was either fired or acquired and then fired after Songbeat lost a copyright infringement suit to Warner Brothers in Germany.
Representatives of Songbeat have stated they are planning a swift and successful appeal and are currently in talks with music providers to create a “legal” operation.
Written by: Philip Matthews, Student at the Gonzaga University School of Law
