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Finnish Taxi Drivers Must Pay Music Royalties
jonerik writes "According to this story from Ananova, Finland's Supreme Court has ruled that taxi drivers must pay royalty fees of about $20 annually if they play music in their car while a customer is in the backseat. According to the article, 'Lauri Luotonen, chairman of the Helsinki Taxi Drivers' Association, says the ruling is likely to force most drivers to keep their radios off.'" This includes if they play the radio, which ostensibly already pays such fees.
How will the authorities know if the taxi driver had the radio turned on or off? Will they have a sting operation where an undercover officer hails a taxi, gets in, and then busts the the driver if they turn on the radio but haven't payed the fee?
Depends on the copyright of the songs. If they were all public domain, no.
Now, all the driver would have to do is prove it. Annually. With expensive lawyers.
Yes, he would have to go to court to prove it, because the local RIAA clone would want to make it expensive to buck their system. To that end, they would benefit from spending several thousand to bring doubt into the mind of a jury that he really didn't stick to public domain music only.
Then, after 'proving' him a liar, they'd hit him with punitive damages as hard as possible to keep all the other sheep in line.
Things are getting bad, and they're only going to get worse. This crap will continue.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
This makes me wonder how the taxi driver fits into this picture at all, economically speaking. Are the taxi drivers making money off of the radio? Do they charge people extra to listen to the radio? Do people frequent taxi services that play the radio more often than those who don't? Probably not, so why are they being forced to pay up? It just seems wrong.
Moderators, what the hell is so funny about that? This is in essence exactly what the Finnish Supreme Court decided, with the one provision that money is being made in the vicinity. There's no reason now the RIAA can't go after your office if you listen to the radio while you work, or hear the radio played by the coworker in the next cubicle.
How the fuck did we get to a point where possibly the least important industry imaginable has such immense, outrageous, incomprehensible-to-our-ancestors influence and power?
I believe they want to charge cab drivers because taxi services are businesses that make money. By playing the radio, you are "enhancing" the taxi ride experience, and the music industry thinks they should be compensated. I don't necessarily agree with this philosophy, so don't flame me please. Just thought I'd point out what the issue is really about.
Vote for Pedro
When commercial radio plays, the radio station usually pays whatever fees are associated with the music they are playing. Those fees are often paid by the sponsors who also have their advertisements played on those same airwaves.
The fees are already paid whether or not someone listens to it. This is double taxation... paying for something that has already been paid for. What kind of moronic nonsense is this?
Should cab drivers be allowed to show movies in their cabs?
This isn't the same thing. The question should read 'should cab drivers be allowed to show commercial TV in their cabs' - complete with all the commercials which are already being used to pay the fucking royalties on whatever is shown in the 'non-ad' breaks.
If each person in the cab had their own radio set it wouldn't be a public performance, but because they're listening to exactly the same material from a shared speaker it becomes public. This is definitely the sort of reasoning of someone who can afford to buy their own congressman. Any sane person would throw it straight out.
The radio station has already paid the right for a public performance, and anyone who wants to listen to that performance (and suffer the ads) should be free to do so.
I used to think it would be cool to live in Finland. I thought they were a mellow, friendly, low-key kinda country. They are hard asses. Check out this link about traffic some fines in Finland... HARDCORE. Looks like they base their fines on a percentage of your YEARLY income... doh!
I seriously wish other countries would be equally harsh. It encourage people to actually drive responsibly. Perhaps it would the 50000 odd annual traffic deaths in th U.S.
This logic already exists in the US, but it's not the territory of the RIAA, it's the territory of ASCAP/BMI.
This is the toll-master of the music publishing business. Whenever a song by the artist formerly known as Prince (but now again known as Prince) has a song played, he gets a clink in the bank. If Tom Jones remakes another one of his songs (God please no), then Prince gets more money as his music is published through ASCAP/BMI.
ASCAP/BMI assures that those who write music are paid for it when it is used, regardless who sings it. It's actually not a bad system because it assures that song writers like Burt Bacharach keep churning out music, and bad singers keep recording them.
Where it goes horribly wrong is that the record companies themselves seem to be pretty much exempt from the ASCAP/BMI fees. ASCAP/BMI seems to concentrate on radio stations, the music-on-hold for businesses, bars, Muzak and now, Finish taxicabs.
Now and again, when you walk into a dance club or bar, you'll see a yellow sticker proudly displayed with the letters ASCAP. It means that this bar owner actually paid his yearly fees.
Why is it that so many comments bring up either the fact that the radio already pays royalties, so it's insane to force the cabbies to pay double taxes OR the fact that other businesses already pay royalties for having a radio? Shouldn't the real focus of the discussion be the question why anybody has to pay royalties for something that has already been paid for by the radio stations? That legislation was bad to begin with, partly because of the slippery slope risks of it, which are becoming very apparent now. Unfortunately, $20/year is a low fee on a per-fare basis, so I'm afraid most drivers and/or taxi companies will pay up, but I'd rather they didn't, because it is going to end up as an extra cost for the passenger, and I really don't want to pay any money for bad music, which is the only kind of music played on the radio anyway (if they are even playing any music - the last time I turned that hideous thing they were just advertising bad music) to some nauseatingly terrorist organization like the Recording Industry Army of America or their local cells.
I for one welcome our new SCOviet Russian overlords to whom all our base are belong.
The law is not written in C. Unless you used the C to write a fuzzy logic processor and then used.... well never mind. It's not simply black and white. Remember that next time lament that all is lost.
-malakai
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
Honestly? Corrupt politicians bowing before their music and movie industry masters in some of the most influential states of the union (New York, California, basically all liberal strongholds). Before the mid-1990s none of this was really an issue. Then along came the Internet and the RIAA and MPAA became household words. Seriously, did ANYONE know what the RIAA was before attacks against Napster? Did you ever worry when you were sitting in your room in the 1980s with your friends dubbing tapes on your tape-to-tape high speed dubbing recorder that you were STEALING from the RIAA.. err, the artists? Did you ever fear that thugs would be breaking down your door and carting away all your stereo equipment, or that you'd be dragged into court and brought up on charges? Where DID we go wrong allowing them to grab too much power? Frankly we should be demanding our legislators abolish copyrights altogether. The industries that benefit most from it have shown they will use every underhanded legal tactic to fuck over the consumer using an artificially conceived notion of "intellectual property".
It's a crock of shit in my opinion, and should be flagrantly ignored. Ever listened to the statement made at the end of an NFL game? It goes something like this Any re-broadcast, description or accounts of this event are prohibited without the express written consent of the NFL. Accounts? Descriptions? Every time I hear that I want to call the NFL commissioner and tell him to go fuck himself.
This kind of crap is getting severely out of hand. It really makes me wonder what kind of souless retards we have working in management in these industries that think these things are a good idea.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.