Canadian Music Industry Drills Dentists

hereisnowhy writes "CBC reports that the tranquil music that wafts through many dental offices to soothe patients and mask the sounds of the drill may soon be silenced. The music industry is putting the bite on dentists -- demanding that they pay for the right to play it. The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada would also like to extend this policy to 'coffee shops, clothing stores, lounges, elevators -- even radio tunes that people hear on the telephone while on hold.' Are any composers and authors actually in favour of this, or just the publishers?"

Comments

ASCAP & BMI...

[l810c]

...have been doing this in the US for forever. I worked at a resturaunt in college 15 years ago and we had CD's playing. They sent someone arownd to every business in town and said to play CD's you had to pay their fee's. We switched to radio, which is legal.

A couple of years later I ran a bar that had live music and we played CD's. We had to pay ASCAP and BMI nearly $3000 a year to cover CD's and the bands playing cover songs.

"Fair use" by tradition, but not by law?

[LostCluster]

There's a bit of an interesting situation here... the publishers are trying to assert themselves into what presently is a very murky space in copyright land.

Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment. Of course, since it'd take a lot of work to observe all of the places this is going on, it's one of those bits of copyright law that more or less has been nullified by simple non-enforcement, and therefore slipped into that consumer-friendly category known as "fair use".

Case law has more or less said in the past that if a radio station is being pumped through an amplifier system throughout a building, then whomever is doing that needs to pay because they're redistributing the station. However, if they set up a standalone radio in every room and tune them all to the same frequency, they get the same effective sounds throught the building but don't have to pay because they're not redistributing, but just letting the boom boxes do their thing. But again, that often ends up unnoticed and unenforced.

Major sports venues have to pay for copyright licenses... but your local high school football venue likely uses the same music without paying for it.

Seems like this is an RIAA crackdown just waiting to happen...

Re:"Fair use" by tradition, but not by law?

[MBCook]

The record companies out to be PAYING THE DENTISTS. Let's face it, how many other places are there where you get a captive audience who can't get away? At a car dealer or something I can walk out the door. But when you're stuck in the dentist's chair with a pair of hands in your mouth, you can't avoid the music too easily.

You go to bookstores and they have CDs up front of the music they are playing in the store, why aren't record companies doing the same thing at dentist's offices?

Don't kid yourself...

[Anonymous Coward]

...is that somebody might actually get paid for elevator music.

It's actually among the highest-paying gigs in music. Each session runs a few hours, and they want to maximize their time by recording a lot of music. That requires top-notch studio musicians -- because there's no such thing as rehearsal. You walk into the studio at 9AM and they plop a folder filled with sheet music in front of you. They call the first tune, the red light goes on, and you play.

And let me tell you: You'd better get it right in one take. 'Cause like I say, it's a high-paying gig. If you can't hack it, there's a line of musicians out the door looking to take your seat.

Can I still play music in my record store?

[tentimestwenty]

I'd hate to have to pay to play all those CDs I'm trying to sell on the record company's behalf...

It's pretty bad

[JediTrainer]

My father is a dentist in Canada (in the Toronto area). This has been going on for months now, and the Canadian Dental Association sent him a notice nearly a year ago about dentists getting harassed about this.

I was pretty shocked to say the least, but if you can believe it, even the 'on hold' music qualifies as "public entertainment" in the view of these idiots. Where most businesses used to be able to just tune a radio and plug that into the telephone, that practice has now effectively been outlawed. In fact, he's never played CDs in his office - he's only used the radio (nevermind that the stations have already paid the 'public entertainment' tax), and that appears to be a no-no as well.

The unfortunate solution to this whole mess was to:

stop playing ANY music in the office

replace the 'on hold' radio with a paid-for recording which has royalty-free music in the background

In the end, SOCAN didn't get much money from him, I don't think, because the royalty-free music was composed in-house in the firm that recorded his fancy new telephone greeting for waiting callers. But the whole idea riled him up so much I think they've lost the whole family in customers when it comes to buying music in the future. Go figure.

Are any artists in favour of this?

[Gribflex]

Are any composers and authors actually in favour of this, or just the publishers?

I asked my wife, a musician, the above question. She replied with "No, that's stupid!" In addition to thinking it was stupid, she also seemed to feel that it was more important the people heard her music than that she was paid for every time it was played.

After asking her about the 'other sides' opinion that the artists need to get paid fairly for their work, she reminded me that even though she is a musician, she won't ever receive the royalties. In her case, she plays with an orchestra. This means that it is not her that is the artist, but the orchestra. And it is not her that can complain, but rather the orchestra director and (possibly) the conductor. But more likely the recording label, not the actual orchestra.

So, OK. The orchestra gets paid. That means that she gets more money because the royalties trickle down in her paychecks. Wrong. She is paid a fixed salary, independent of how much revenue the orchestra makes.

OK, so she isn't exactly a rock star, nor does she make millions with her music, but she is still a recording artist and the law does not benefit her, nor will it ever.

Where this is all going . . .

[rogerborn]

This is old, but it still applies... In fact, perhaps now, more than ever.

The End of the Internet
http://mymac.com/showarticle.php?id=494

(Some time in the near future)

I finally found a way to make money off the Internet. I did it by writing a book about how the Net died.

Not that I made any money while it existed, you see. No one did.

Oh, like everyone else, I loved the Internet for all the freedom it gave me, and the wealth of information and idea exchange, where everyone profited from that free flow of thought and information. But, you know how Man is. Never underestimate his ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory!

Why did it end? Simple: It was greed.

First it started with the Spammers. There got to be so much Spam, that even Congressmen were snowed under with the daily deluge. No one could get their legitimate mail because of the thousands of fake letters these inventive Spammers were sending out with their Web bots. Congress finally made a law strong enough that any of them could be shot on sight. Some hacker then posted on the Web a public list of the lot of them, and soon they were all dead.

The public, long laboring under all that Spam, liked what they did so much, that they killed off all the hackers too. This had a profound effect on people taking computer science and engineering classes, did you know that?

That was the first nail in the coffin of the Net. We should have all paid attention to it. But no one did. We were all too busy trying to make a buck off of the Net.

The next coffin nail came when the Music and Movie companies finally paid Congress enough money to have the copyright laws changed. It was easy once Disney got them to extend copyright privileges another hundred years. The new law that Congress passed was very comprehensive! In fact, no one could listen to the music without breaking the new laws!

Now it was a Federal offense to even read or see anything that was copyrighted. If you did, there would be an unauthorized copy in your brain that you could access just by remembering. Oh, you could legitimately purchase a copy of anything copyrighted in the stores, but you could never open that copy and view it or listen to it. Tough law!

That's why all the libraries in the country were permanently closed. Right after that the schools and colleges were all shut down, and their teachers and administrators put away for using copyrighted materials in their classrooms. Students, however, were forgiven their offense in this, but all their books and notes were confiscated and burned.

The next nail came with the legal view of computer hardware. That legal POV stated that the desktop, palmtop, or laptop computer you were using could also hold, however briefly, yet another copy of any copyrighted material you might put into it, for transfer to a CD, or perhaps downloaded off the Web. Congress just attached this to their Anti-Terrorism Bill for Secure Systems Standards. Remember, these devices were considered guilty until proven innocent, just as their owners were. It seems the very existence of these machines was now suspect, because someone, somewhere, might use them for pirating copyrighted material!

Therefore all these computing devices became illegal to even own. No more Computers!

The music companies, having now gotten their way with Congress, finally had a law written that was so powerful, even they were locked up! They were all sent to prison for having a copy of their own music, which they had bought (or rather stolen) from the artists. Just deserts!

Then the movie producers and the owners of movie theaters were locked up for the same violation of this powerful new copyright law! They were sent away for distributing more than one copy of their movies.

Then the music artists and singers were all locked away for the same reason. Worse, for under the new law, many were sent up the river for playing their own songs too many time