Babe project - Legal feedback

[Martin Flöser]

Am 2018-02-03 18:07, schrieb Camilo Higuita Rodriguez:
> Hi,everyone
> 
> I'd like to discuss something with the community, and maybe get some
> legal input:
> 
> As some of you might already know I'm working on a open online
> platform to share music information between users, such as public
> playlists, comments on tracks and on the playback progress like
> soundcloud, share popular music suggestions, metadata, and discovery
> of new music from another users with integration with YouTube and
> Spotify etc... the platform will be integrated into Babe music player
> and could be use in any other music player
> 
> The legal matter comes here:
> 1- I would like to either have the option to *stream live* the music
> an user is currently listening to to a group of friends. here the
> music file isn't being storaged in the audience computer...
> How ilegal is it? How illegal is to stream live, but privately,
> copyrighted music?  and how illegal is it to stream owns music content
> to a selected group of friends?
> 
> 2- If the stream part wouldn't be enought problem, I'd also like to
> sync a user playlist marked as public to some other friends, that
> would mean to share music files between users, and technically
> downloading another users music files. How illegal is this part? how
> illegal is to share a music file for example, in a conversation in
> telegram or whatsapp, or even how illegal is it to send a mp3 to a
> friend over an email or even over google drive?
> 
> I'd like to get feedback about this issues

Like Christian, I recommend to consult a lawyer specialized on Copyright 
law. What's extremely important is that there won't be an answer which 
is globally unique.

I'll give you an example for my area of legislation (Germany). We have 
the concept of a private copy (Privatkopie) [1] which allows to share 
media with friends and family. There is a ruling of the highest German 
court (BGH) which can be interpreted as the number of friends and family 
is 7 [2].

Given that the answer to your questions from a German perspective is 
IMHO (though IANAL) that it is clearly illegal if a user would use this 
feature.

Cheers
Martin

[1] § 53 URHG https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__53.html
[2] BGH, GRUR 1978, 474