A Copyfighter\’s Musings

Via Postplay comes this article
from News.com about Mercora’s new web-based music search tool. 
Let me counter a bit of the hype: in terms of Mercora’s core features,
this is unremarkable. It is merely a web-based version of the existing
Mercora software.  The ability to search for and instantaneously
play particular artists or songs is already available through the
Mercora client. As in the software client, you can only access content
that is at that very moment being streamed by one of Mercora’s
users.  All this does is allow you to do so through a web
browser after you’ve already installed the Mercora software.

Though SoundExchange’s John Simson states that they’re evaluating the
legality of the new web-based service, the legal questions appear no
different than for the software client. Mercora can provide these
on-demand streams in a lawful way by ensuring that each individual
user is following the DMCA guidelines
for non-interactive webcasting. So far as I can tell, Mercora violates
no law regarding on-demand streaming because they are not actually the
ones streaming. They’re just providing a search engine for songs
currently being streamed by the myriad individual Mercora users. 

This feature is fairly cool, at least for popular content.  Even
though there are plenty of Mercora users with rarer tracks, the rarer
the content the more unlikely it is to be webcast at the moment you
want it.  Also, streams through Mercora can sometimes be slow and
of unreliable quality.

  Filed by Derek Slater at 1:48 am under General news