Recently I have been playing around with imeem for a service review. Imeem is an online community where artists, fans & friends can promote their content, share their tastes, and discover new blogs, photos, music and video. Once you have found or uploaded music (mp3 format) you can distribute playlists on their own websites and blogs via an embedded flash-based player.  Well today, I found out that Warner Music Group is suing them for copy infringement.

Warner Music Group Corp. is suing the operators of the social-networking Web site imeem, claiming the portal enables millions of computer users to share its artists’ music and video content without permission. The lawsuit was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on behalf of several New York-based Warner Music Group subsidiaries, including Atlantic Recording Corp., Elektra Entertainment Group Inc., and Warner Bros. Records Inc. The record company seeks a court order to stop imeem from using Warner Music content on its site, and unspecified damages, including up to $150,000 for each unauthorized music video or song posted on the Web site.

When uploading music to the site, imeem presents the following warning:

A friendly note about uploading content: Only upload your own music and video, or stuff you have permission to share. Uploading media that you do not own can be a violation of the artist’s copyrights and against the law if you do not have legal permission from the copyright owner. Your account may be shut down if you don’t follow the imeem terms of service.

However, this small paragraph of text doesn’t seem to dissuade many of imeem’s users, since there is abundant content that is clearly in violation of this rule. As Jason Herskowitz points out, “Actually what I think is even more scary is that the users of imeem could be next. “. Dubious of the potential copyright violations, and fear of litigation,  I decided that instead of uploading my own music, I would create a playlist based on music other users have uploaded.