Listening To The Radio At Work? Prepare To Be Sued

MLCT writes "The Performing Rights Society, one of the UK's royalties collecting societies, has taken a Scottish car servicing company to court because the employees are alleged to have been listening to the radio at work, allowing the music to be 'heard by colleagues and customers'. The PRS is seeking £200,000 in damages for the 'performances of the music' which they claim equates to copyright infringement. The judge, Lord Emslie, has ruled that the case can continue to hearing evidence, commenting that the key point to note was that music was 'audibly blaring from employee's radios'. Where do the extents of a 'public performance' end? Radios on in cabs?"

Comments

Somebody please, stop the madness

[j0e_average]

It is completely unreasonable to expect compensation for second-hand radio.

Re:Somebody please, stop the madness

[ediron2]

Heh... second-hand got me to thinking: imagine a second-hand-smoke victim receiving a countersuit by tobacco companies because they were able to inhale cigarette smoke they hadn't paid for.

This is about that absurd.

Theatrical broadcast implies a desire for an audience to hear the performance leading them to the venue. Charging admission shows enrichment. Venue must reimburse the artists in such a case. Sensible so far.

Muzak (or elevator music or bland background music, for those that don't know the slang) creates mood for a particular commercial location (restaurant, store, elevator, or even music-on-hold). This mood is carefully cultivated for whatever commercial goal by the vendor, so the vendor should be reimbursing artists for their help in making the store/restaurant mood.

But music played by workers at a construction site or a repair shop... that's for the benefit of the employees and usually at the expense of the customer. I'd no sooner wander down to the mechanic's to listen to his boom box than I'd want to eavesdrop off most strangers' ipods. Hell, I thought that was the greatest part of ipods: boomboxes became anachronistic jokes.

Charging royalties for unwanted intrusions of music is the most absurd damn thing I've ever heard of, and tries to claim economic value where none exists. It'd be like demanding royalties from the owners of all those noisy damn cars driving around with mega stereos in their trunks rattling my windows...

Hmm... on the other hand, maybe I'm in *favor* of this, if another wave of unwanted noiseboxes are silenced. Dumbass argument, desirable side effect.

Re:Somebody please, stop the madness

[Seumas]

I don't understand the point here.

Radio is supported by advertising. What does it matter if 500 people are listening to 500 radios or 500 are listening to a single radio? I understand that the idea is that "those are 500 people who will not be counted toward royalty payments", but since royalties are entirely calculated by the size of the listening audience -- how does it matter unless some of those 500 people are also part of some "Nielson" family? If they're all listening to separate radios, is some sort of magic going to occur where they can tell that 500 radios are turned on and to a specific station?

On hold

[MichaelSmith]

Back when I worked for the state government road authority we ran a small call centre for breakdowns, etc. The audio switcher had an input for an on hold message and for a long time we fed in a signal from a commercial radio station.

The theory is that they are broadcasting N copies of their signal anyway, and a few extra listeners are also going to be hearing the advertisements which pay for the broadcast. It scales, so what is the problem?

More to the point, if I listen alone in my car and an advert comes on then I will change to a different station. If I am listening to somebody else's radio then I have to listen to the advert, so by that argument they should be encouraging people to share radios.

Missing the point of the social contract

[Endymion]

They can collect on "public performances" of the radio when they start paying me for trespassing on my property with all that RF.

This is not a copyright violation as it's "publicly performing" things that were already sent out over public airways. Really, it's almost equivalent to the idiots suing because people used the "hacking technology" of HTTP to get the files they publicly offered.