mnmlist: The Week in Social: #payback for BA, @ministryofsound vs @Spotify and @SenJohnMcCain’s war games.

The internet is for three things: cats, porn and complaining. One Twitter user pays to get his point across to British Airways, Ministry of Sound sues Spotify to find out if playlist sequences can be copyrighted. And having moaned about both of these fine businesses in the past, I grab my popcorn and eagerly wait for developments.

The Week In Social 06 Sept John McCAin Poker British AIrways Promoted Tweet Spotify sued by Ministry of Sound

#payback. By now, we’ve become used to seeing brands using Promoted Tweets to snag an eye-catching position in our Twitter timelines to expand their conversation/market their wares. Promoted Tweets are essentially advertisements that can target Twitter users by keywords, interest, geography and device. One chap, majorly ticked off with British Airways’ silence (the irony!) after losing his dad’s luggage, decided to promote his Tweet to their followers in the US and UK.

Just when brands think they are getting the hang of this social media stuff, along comes a curveball. BA responded after ten hours and HVSVN’s dad was reunited with his luggage. The Promoted Tweet cost $1000 and was picked up by the BBC, Huffington Post, Mashable and loads more.

(I must admit to some schadenfreude here as I had a lousy experience with BA last Monday from Chicago with a pair of flight attendants in Club World that were miserable, inattentive and, in one case, possibly drunk. “To fly, to serve” BA claim.)

Can you copyright a playlist? Ministry of Sound want to know and are suing music streaming service Spotify to find out. Users of the service can create and share playlists with any of the tracks that Spotify has the rights to and it seems that many have been recreating the tracklists of Ministry of Sound compilation albums.

MoS licence the vast majority of these tracks from other labels so they don’t have a claim to the copyright of the music, but they argue that they have a right to copyright on the sequence the tracks appear on their albums. “If we don’t step up and take some action against a service and users that are dismissing our curation skills as just a list, that opens up the floodgates to anybody who wants to copy what a curator is doing” says MoS Chief Executive Lohan Presencer.

Legal experts are pointing to a similar case in 2010 when the UK High Court ruled that English and Scottish football leagues had copyright on their fixture lists, but this was later overturned. My feeling is that MoS will struggle with this one.

War Games. US Senator John McCain has not had a great deal of luck with gambling in the past (remember Sarah Palin?) and this week he was snapped playing poker on his iPhone during a Senate hearing on Syria.

McCain laughed it off on Twitter, but it seems that that decision too was a poor one.

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Enda Guinan is a consultant and trainer offering advice on social media and product delivery for individuals and small businesses. Get in touch to see how you can make the best use of your time and energy as you put together your social media plans.