Which laws must I consider when allowing users to upload and stream music? For context sake, I'm based in the UK - so (primarily) I'm interested in relevant British law, but assuming users of my new software are going to be global - what laws must I pay particular attention to when offering an 'upload and play' music feature? To clarify, one user may upload their favourite song, and all other users can stream that from the uploaded file. In case it matters, I'm not allowing a user to upload a song - and then advertising that song by artist and title to other users (similar to p2p). Instead, I'm offering users a chance to publish a song against their page. Very similar to how MySpace done it all those years back.
Very similar to how MySpace done it all those years back.... MySpace did it differently back then because they got sued for copyright violations for the music their users were uploading and streaming. https://www.google.com/search?q=myspace+lawsuit+music These days, you can upload music to MySpace, but they have licenses and agreements with music publishers, and are clear to their users what can be legally uploaded: https://help.myspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/202591770-Music-Upload-Requirements And remember.... By uploading any content to Myspace, you hereby certify that you own the copyright in or have all the necessary rights related to such content to upload it. Don't step on someone else's hard work. And Myspace is are clear on how they handle copyright violations: https://help.myspace.com/hc/en-us/articles/202055394-Copyright-FAQs Myspace will respond to allegations of copyright violations in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”). The DMCA provides a process for a copyright owner to give notification to an online service provider concerning alleged copyright infringement. Now, with your question: you are allowing users to both upload music and stream it. Streaming is legal in the UK; see an older question here on LSE Is Streaming Copyrighted Content Illegal in the UK But the hosting - storing the actual files - of copyrighted material is not legal. But my app knows no detail of the song uploaded. Could be anything.... This doesn't matter; the files are on your server. You run the risk of legal action being taken against you for the actual .mp3 file of copyrighted music on your server. You are the owner of the webserver, and thus control the files on it, along with your knowledge of building an App that allows users to upload the files. Even if you claim to know nothing about what users upload with the App you built, the music files are on your server. What happens also depends on where the server with the music files is located, i.e. in the UK (action against you legally possible), or elsewhere (legal action against depends on the country and their laws and agreements with other countries). If your server is in a third-party country and can't be taken down, but you are a UK resident, the music companies can still go after you in other respects, as the paying owner of the server, the owner of the domain registration, even possibly as the creator of the App itself.
Quoting content may or may not constitute copyright infringement, depending on the various factors that go into the fair use defense. Short quotes which are made for the purpose of discussion, research and commentary and not for copy would be squarely in the domain of "fair use" under US law. That means that the copyright owner would not succeed in suing you for quoting them: under the statutory mechanism for recognizing his right to his intellectual product, there is a limit on how much control he can exert over your behavior (since the two of you have not worked out some kind of agreement -- copyright law creates rights even when there is no contract). As for Facebook, you have a contract with them, embodied in the terms of service. You have been given permission to access material that they host (permission is required, under copyright law), and their permission is conditional. It says "you may access stuff on our platform only as long as you do X": if that includes a clause "don't be nasty", then that limits your right to speak freely and be as nasty as you'd like. If it says "don't quote even a little", that means you cannot quote even a little, even when you would have the statutory right to quote a little (or, to be nasty). Fair use would mean that you can't be sued for copyright infringement of the stuff that you quoted a little of. You can, however, be expelled from Facebook. You probably cannot be sued for "accessing Facebook without permission". There is a federal law against unauthorized access of computer networks, and there was a failed attempt to construe violation of a TOS as "unauthorized access" – it isn't. But accessing Facebook necessarily involves copying (that's how computers work), and there is no "fair use" defense whereby everybody has a fair use right to access Facebook. Theoretically you could be sued for copyright infringement, for accessing Facebook's intellectual property without permission. Also, Facebook can rescind your permission to access their content (see this case), and once you have been banned, it is a crime to further access their network. This assumes that there is no overriding limit on contracts that would nullify a no-quoting condition. There is no such limit on contracts in the US, so such a contract would be enforceable. There is also nothing illegal (unenforceable) about a TOS which prohibits automated methods of access.
Even if I give credit to the composer, and I will make no profit from the performance, will it still be illegal to use my transcription? This definitely infringes the composer's performance and derivative work rights under the composer's copyright. There is a mandatory right to cover someone else's composition outside of a movie or TV show (roughly speaking) for a statutorily fixed royalty, but the bureaucracy is such that it would be impractical to do here. Whether or not the &quot;fair use&quot; defense applies in this case is a &quot;colorable&quot; argument, but really, when you perform the entire work as written except for transcription, winning a &quot;fair use&quot; defense in a infringement action would be a long shot. The fact that it is somehow connected to an educational activity would be the strongest argument in this case. Also, as noted in a comment, your school may have obtained express permission to cover the work: Your music school may have a license with a PRO (performing rights organization) that covers your song. You might make some inquiries with the administration as to whether this is the case. Radio stations obtain similar licenses to play a large catalog of music without individually obtaining licenses to use each work separately from the author. This said, this kind of activity is often done, despite the fact that it is a copyright infringement, and most of the time, if the performance isn't too widely broadcast, most copyright owners will never pursue copyright infringement claims over something like this and indeed often won't even consider doing so. Still, copyright is an absolute bar to infringing rights without permission, even if there is absolutely no money received for the work and even if there is full attribution of its author. I'm not a great fan of the law as it is, and it is often disregarded, but that is the law. Also, this answer is based upon U.S. law, but there isn't much international variation in this part of copyright law in countries that meaningfully enforce copyright laws in their courts. But, as another answer notes, in some countries the mandatory right to do a cover of songs in the U.S. is much easier bureaucratically, in some other countries: In several countries, there are organizations that deal with the copyright issue globally. That means you pay a certain (quite small) fee to be allowed to perform a piece of music publicly, and the organization deals with the individual right owners. That makes reusing works much simpler.
I presume the input is text: "my original text" is assumed to mean you wrote (created) the text. That means that you hold the copyright to the text, and only you can authorize a derivative work (such as a synthesized recording). Therefore, you hold the copyright to the recordings as well. The crucial consideration governing that right is that you "created" the work, meaning that there is a modicum of creativity. However, if you did not create the text and your only function is to host an automatic process where users can create a synthesized recording, then whoever created the text has the right to the text and derivative works (i.e. the synthesized output). Automated processes like (unassisted) OCR or wav-to-mp3 conversion would not count as being "original", nor would automatic text-to-speech, so you don't gain copyright just from making an automatic work-creating tool available. On the assumption that the conversion involves a component of Chrome, you can use the service per the terms of service, though you cannot "reproduce, duplicate, copy, sell, trade or resell the Services". This might limit the extent to which you could make this conversion available to others, depending on how, exactly, you could do such a thing (does it duplicate the service?). As they say, Google owns all legal right to the Services, but Google obtains no right from you for any content created through their service. There is no restriction in the TOS against using the service for commercial purposes. Even if there were, that would not assign copyright in the recording to anyone else, it would just mean they could sue you for violating the TOS.
It's really your client that should be asking these questions. Writing the app is perfectly legal. So you can enter a contract with that client to write the app and deliver it to them, ready to be put on the Google Play store or the App Store (entering a contract needs to be done carefully, obviously). I'd make 100 million percent sure that the contract states clearly that you have zero responsibility if the app is rejected or removed for non-technical reasons, and that the legality of actually selling and running the app is also not your responsibility. The reason is that I very much suspect that running the app might be illegal, and that the chances of getting it permanently on one of the stores are rather slim. And solving those problems is outside of what a software developer can competently do.
First of all derivative works are not exactly "illegal". They are fully legal if the owner of the copyright in the original work has given permission. If no permission has been given, they may be copyright infringements. But they may fall under an exception to copyright. Under US law, the most common exception is "fair use". See this question and answer for more on fair use. But particularly relevant in this case is that a parody is usually a fair use, although as in every fair-use decision, there is pretty much no clear-cut, hard&amp;fast rule on what is and is not fair use. In the UK and much of the EU (or maybe all of it, I am not sure) there is a somewhat similar concept known as "fair dealing". It is also an exception to copyright. So it is possible that such works fall under fair use, fair dealing, or another exception to copyright, or that the rights-holder has given permission. Secondly, copyright infringement is a tort, not a crime, under most circumstances. It is enforced when, and only when, a copyright-holder chooses to take action, sending a take-down notice or copyright complaint, of filing suit for infringement. Some rights-holders choose as a matter of policy not to take such actions, thinking that such derivative works actually benefit them. That is their choice to make. Some rights-holders don't have the time or money to track down and take action against most infringements, and will only act if they think the derivative work will in some way cost them a lot of money or harm their reputation. Some rights-holders may just not have heard, yet, of specific possible infringing derivative works. As for Acta2, it has not yet been approved, the Wikipedia article linked in the questions says: In order for the text of the directive to become law in the EU, it must be approved by the European Council on 9 April 2019 The article also mentions significant continuing opposition. If it is approved, it is not clear, to me at least, how it will affect sites hosting such content, nor how it will interact with the copyright law of individual EU nations. If approved, it will no doubt take some time before enforcement is widespread. And of course it will only apply when EU law applies. If both site and author are outside the EU -- say if both are from the US -- it seems that it could not apply.
The answer depends in part what venue you're talking about, e.g. Reddit, Facebook etc. The details are revealed somewhere in the Terms of Service for that venue. The general pattern is that you are allowed to use that venue, provides you grant permission for the service to do what they do with your content. You cannot legally send them a take-down notice for your stuff, because a take-down notice requires you to say that the stuff was posted without your permission (and that is false – and you can be punished for making that statement). There could be a venue where they do not hold you to an irrevocable license, in which case you could revoke that permission (but not Reddit: you granted them a "royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so"). I've seen a site that actually asserts ownership of user-contributed content (I don't know if their TOS ended up being litigated) – if is not at all hard to write a TOS that includes transfer of copyright, rather than granting of a license. The only hard parts are (1) figuring out what you want in terms of permission to use and (2) whether your answer to (1) means nobody will use your service. SE and Reddit TOS probably are as close as you need to get for what you describe.
The platform will get in trouble for copyright infringement. The disclaimer that you are not liable does not work, legally, since the person suing you hasn't agreed to the TOS on your webpage. You can be sued for &quot;secondary infringement&quot;, meaning that not only the uploader but also you the service provider are liable. The solution to this quandry is the &quot;DMCA safe harbor&quot;, a set of rules which, if you follow them, you won't be held liable. The specific piece of law is here. The essence of the rules is that you have to have a &quot;designated agent&quot; who receives takedown notices: if a copyright owner finds their stuff on your page, they officially notify you, then you take the material down – expeditiously (no dawdling). You notify the uploader, they either accept the takedown or file a counterclaim, you notify the rights-holder, there's a waiting period, then the rights holder can file a lawsuit, or not. If the rights-holder doesn't file suit, you can put the material back up. You cannot rely solely on the intricate DMCA notice / counter-notice dance, because under para (c)(1)(A)(ii) of §512, you also must not be &quot;aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent&quot;.