Intellectual Property Law

Gimado Music Search: Next to Get Sued by Warner?Mashable!

Gimado is the latest to launch a music search engine, very similar in function to SeeqPod. Crawling the web for mp3s, your search query will return a list of results for songs that can be played and downloaded. I played around on the site for a while, and it looks that most of the content available on Gimado is coming directly from eSnips. As with most other sites that perform the same type of web crawling for music search results, a good amount of the content was completely unavailable. It would be helpful to both users as well as Gimado if these particular songs could be flagged.

To add a bit of a recommendation system, songs can be rated on a star scale from 1 to 5, however, as there are no accounts or sections for most popular songs, I?m not entirely sure where these ratings come back into play. Based on what the Gimado team has told me, however, there are several plans for the music search engine that are being developed right now?some of these will go towards widgets, a contact importer, and the ability to save songs in a playlist.

Another interesting direction Gimado plans on taking is an ad revenue-sharing model, which will be a 50-50 split. This take on things is along the same lines as Songza, which recently launched its own self-promotion option for artists to participate in, essentially getting the community more directly involved with the success of the site and empowering artists and members as well.

When it?s all said and done, though, is Gimado merely setting itself up for a lawsuit from Warner? The record label is already after Seeqpod, claiming the music search engine is acting as a distributor. And as Gimado offers direct download options, it too could be asking for trouble, given the still uncertain climate of online music search, distribution, licensing and play.

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Full post as published by IP Law Daily on February 01, 2008 (boomark / email).