According to TechDirt's breakdown of the suit, Lowery is arguing that Spotify is failing to obtain the necessary mechanical licenses for many of the compositions in its database, including some of his; the case may hinge, among other issues, on whether the company properly complied with technical requirements for situations in which it didn't know who the copyright holders were. (A second lawsuit was filed by the singer-songwriter Melissa Ferrick in early January.) Certainly the missing names did not slow co-founder Daniel Ek's quest to license all the world's music. However, it's not entirely clear whether Spotify even needs a mechanical license to stream music. A stream isn't a copy in the same way that a download is—in many ways, it is more like a performance. The Copyright Act of 1976 is too dated to provide much useful statutory guidance.