Nine major record labels are filing suit against the popular music sharing and streaming site Project Playlist. Playlist.com provides embedded music players for users at MySpace, Blogger, and Facebook. The record labels are accusing Project Playlist of copyright infringement.

Project Playlist allows users to search, play, and share music through a web index compiled by the company. “Accordingly, our search engine is based upon our growing index of links to music files legally posted on the Internet for promotional or other legal purposes,” Project Playlist said on its site. “We do not control those third party websites. We do not host music files. We do not allow uploading or downloading of music files to projectplaylist.com.”

Playlist.com actually searches through all the available MP3 files hosted on websites around the web. Even though Playlist.com doesn’t actually host any of the music, the record labels will argue that the site provides an avenue to illegally hosted music. The majority of the available music are copyrighted. It was easy for us to search, for example, Kanye West’s entire music library.

In the past, sites that were allegedly distributing pirate music have tried to argue that the contents were not hosted by them, and thus have not violated any copyrights. However, this has not stopped the labels in actively pursuing this suit and often than not getting their way and having the sites shut down completely. Remember all those MP3 sharing apps like Napster? Well, they didn’t host their own music either.

Similarly, The Pirate Bay also indexes torrent files and not actually host any of the copyrighted material. But it too is facing a barrage of attacks from legal entities.

The record labels are seeking to stop Project Playlist from continuing its practices and is also asking for unspecified damages.

The nine record labels include: Warner Music Group Corp’s Atlantic Recording Corp, Elektra Entertainment Group Inc and Warner Bros. Records Inc; EMI Group Plc’s Capitol Records LLC, Priority Records LLC and Virgin Records America Inc; and the Interscope Records, Motown Record Co LP and UMG Recordings Inc labels of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group.

Curiously, none of labels under the Sony BMG Music Entertainment umbrella are involved.

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