My new social network website i'm working on has a feature for members to upload any audio they like..mp3, wav file, etc. Are they allowed to upload lets say justin timberlake's song and have other members listen to it if they visit their profile. Members will not be able to download any songs they will just be able to listen it. Is that legal?
No, it is not legal and a form of copyright infringement. You must get permission from the copyright holder and pay royalties in order to do this.
Myspace is a huge company with millions of dollars. They are highly established and have a good team of marketers and attorneys. They can afford to pay the royalties to music companies or convince music companies to let their users play certain songs for free.
maybe you should start listening to a lot of music In other words it is virtually impossible to check every song and to make sure it is the owner who uploaded the song.
MySpace does not pay any such royalties. They operate under the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA which grants them legal protection from lawsuits as they are a conduit of information. For this type of case, all the details have not been hammered out in court yet. This is why they were sued at the end of last year by Universal. Safe Harbor - They have registered an agent with the US Copyright Office They remove infringing material when they learn of it They do not upload material themselves (it is user generated) There is more to it, but that's the basics. YouTube operates under the same premise. The exception is that they made a deal with Universal and Warner so that they do not have to take down certain material of theirs. They do not pay royalties on content outside the scope of those agreements. There are other issues that get looked at in cases like this, such as is there substantial non-infringing use of the system (there are a lot of users that are not uploading copyright infringing material) and whether the company has taken steps to do anything about infringement. The Grokster case a few years ago did not do well in court because virtually everything in the P2P network was infringing. It was well known, and they did nothing about it. MySpace, on the other hand, has reporting mechanisms, they released a filtering system at the end of last year, and they have registered their agent with the USCO.