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What is the most popular music search engine?

Is it legal for a search engine to provide an in-page MP3 player linking to music hosted by 3rd parties?

  • Imagine a search engine providing search results. The user may go to the original file or he/she may "preview" is by playing it on a HTML5 player which links to the original. The audio file is never served from the search engine. Would that be legal? Illegal? Grey area? Whatever your take - please explain. Just to be clear: my goal is not to further copyright infringement. I feel there is nothing different in "previewing" an MP3 file when comparing with "previewing" a HTML file. I'm not in the US and the lawyers in my country do not know the answer (you can guess I live in a tiny Latin-American country, we have other issues to care about). I'm not asking for real legal advice but a fair opinion on this topic. In case your take is that such approach won't be legal, please think if it helps if the users' MP3 files are not hosted in US-based servers. As an interesting detail, Google used to provide exactly this feature long time ago, but after just a few months they stopped (no idea why).

  • Answer:

    It doesn't matter what people's opinions about this are: the fact is that there are plenty of companies which are willing to sue you about this issue, and occasionally governments arrest people for websites like the one you describe.

Greg Lindahl at Quora Visit the source

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Not "legal advice", but there are more than a handful of websites that essentially do this, so I doubt it's illegal -- although still likely to get you cease and decisted very quickly. Many get around this by embedding youtube video results of the songs, rather than linking to MP3s, ala http://tubular.com Also, http://Ex.fm does exactly this, by linking to MP3s in their API's search results.

Jordan Feldstein

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