Well in other somewhat unrelated matter Australia seems very likely to reject the idea that circumventing region coding breaches TPM. The committee voted unaminously that region coding is not a form of copyright protection and therefore is not entitled to protection.

Other parts of the report indicate that exemptions will apply to the TPM legislation for those who have a legitimate reason to need to bypass TPM. Which pretty much makes the legislation worthless, once you make ANY exemptions in these matters the cat gets out of the bag very quickly.

Bob.

This subject really gets me going sometimes. My opinion is that the entire entertainment industry has gone nuts over copyright enforcement and royalty collection. I understand people needing to protect their creations but when the big guns go after the little guy it makes me sick. My thoughts are that once I've bought a CD new from a store, I should have a reasonable amout of rights as to how I use it. No I shouldn't be able to burn a bunch of copies and sell them but if I want to make a few copies say for my car, office and computer I should be able to legally do so. And frankly if some guy is doing weekend DJ gigs for a few hundred bucks playing CD's
who cares. The guy is never going to be able to afford a license
so he is either going to cheat or close up shop. And I really don't feel sorry for the majority of the music biz pro's. Those of you who have been around know that for the most part 90 to 95 percent of royalties collected go to about 10 percent of the registered writers, most of whom are very sucessful. The others collect almost nothing. In Nashville they call it mailbox money. You just go to the mailbox and pick up the check. Whatever happened to " No harm, No foul "?

this reminds me of the local school... they're doing "Wizard of Oz" at the end of the month. It's written in 1900, public domain, right? Well, not their copy because it has "over the rainbow" in it so the school can't do squat with it. They're losing money of this thing because a public domain thing has a copyrighted song in it written soon after the copyright laws started to change. Stupid IMHO. They throw im a copyrighted song so that can collect extra $$ for a public domain story.

But, this is the law... I feel bad for the bar owner, if you pay your fees to play the music it shouldn't be illegal for people to sing along with it (so I guess drunks singing to the jutebox can shut down the bar, huh?). When I make some peopular music I'll make sure it's done that way but I can't control what others do.

It's simple. This country is all about protecting big business at the expense of the little guy. It is getting worse and is camouflaged by a newsmedia that is benefitting from it because they are a monopolistic big business as well. Legislation making it worse is quietly passed without the attention of the newsmedia until after the fact and then the wrong people are blamed in order to protect those making this travesty possible. Then the very same public screwed by all of this sits in front of the fictional newscast cheering their executioners on and razzing those trying to stop it.
This only emboldens the large corporations to carry out this assault on the public for profit.

John

This country is all about protecting big business at the expense of the little guy.

Yes, let's get rid of all those evil big businesses. I certainly don't need to drive a car made by a big business. Give me a car built by that mom and pop car company. Same with my video camera. I'd sure rather have a camera made by the little startup. Sure beats the junk made by Sony and those other big companies.

I think we should demonize, condemn, and hassle big businesses until they all go out of business. We all know that every person that works at these companies does so because they are forced to do it and have no other choice. We all know that the people that run them are filthy rich and therefore evil, because it is not possible to be rich without being evil. And because we are all envious of their wealth, which was accumulated by exploiting the environment and exploiting the working class, we can demand that they pay virtually all their money back to the government as a punishment for the audacity they have shown in being so good at what they do. Lets punish them all and take them down to our level. Won't that be great?

I learned a long time ago when I played sports that the best way to win is to put your best players on the bench for half the game. Also, you get far more people at the game if you force the best teams to play with some sort of handicap. People will pay far more money to watch Tiger Woods or the Yankees lose than would pay to watch them to win. Success is over rated. We need more losers.

It's not about protecting big business. BMI is a small group. They are paid a fee by their subscribers (artists like me) to monitor performance and collect royalties from places that perform our works. If they don't monitor and collect (and sometimes be forced to sue) then artists would be suing them for collecting revenues and doing nothing in return. ASCAP is much the same. ASCAP and BMI are integrous organizations that protect the performance rights of others. Should say....Discovery Channel be able to buy your DVD from a store and broadcast it over their system without paying you any money? More appropriately, should Discovery Channel be able to buy your DVD at a local store, and use it as an incentive to get viewers to watch their channel? No one wants to go to a quiet bar/tavern/whatever where there is no music. A tavern without music of some sort? Seems ludicrous to me.
Then there is SESAC, a so-called performance rights company recently caught out openly misinforming non-society members about copyright law, and when caught their response was "oops, we didn't train our people well."

The restaurant in question received multiple notices, sent certified mail, if the story is accurate. This is consistent with how I've known BMI and ASCAP to work. They use legal action as a last resort in virtually all circumstances, based on their records and reports. The restaurant, according to BMI, didn't respond even once to a letter or phone call (over 30 of them in a year). It would have cost them a few hundred bucks per year to be compliant with BMI.
Hmm....pay a few hundred bucks a year to play songs, or ignore phone calls and letters over the course of 24 months from the artist's rights organization and risk tens of thousands...
Seems to me the restaurant made a very bad decision to ignore...

[edit] After reading a couple posts that came in while I was posting...
People in a bar are free to sing whatever they want, any time they want, with or without a jukebox. But if they're singing along with the jukebox, then the bar owner is providing an inducement for people to come to the bar to sing with the jukebox, said jukebox containing pop songs recorded by artists who make their living by others listening to the music. Additionally, due to differences in publishing law, Karaoke has different schedules than does standard performance royalties. It's cheaper, so there is no exuse on the part of the bar owner, IMO.
The music that has become the soundtrack of our lives isn't free. If you want free music, free sculpture, free paintings, free movies, free ANYTHING creative, then go create your own. Creative people should be remunerated if their songs are successful, no different than a jeans or beer company or you should profit from a successful product. Isn't that a huge part of why so many of us do what we do? Chasing the dream and having fun doing it?

I don’t feel sorry for the restaurant owner at all. He should have known better. Why did they start having Karaoke? Did it bring in more customers? Well if they made more money because Karaoke brought in more customers then BMI is just asking for their clients far share. They used BMI clients assets to make their business more attractive and more profitable.

BTW, this is NOT a “little guy”. Every restaurant owner in the country falls under exactly the same law. This is what BMI does. It collects royalties for the use of it’s clients songs from bars, restaurants, etc. BMI didn’t crash a sweet 16 party, a restaurant is a freakin’ business and bound by public laws. It’s like hiring a band without a cabaret license and then crying about it later. If you’re in business, you need to understand the law. Plain and simple.

So if you wrote a song, and you joined BMI to collect royalties for when that song is performed in public and a restaurant performs your song in public, wouldn't you expect BMI to collect your royalties? How can anyone have a problem with that?

You want to hear something that is unfair?

Our local school is doing an 8th grade production of Aladdin. They had to pay Disney extra so that I could video tape it BUT (get this) you cannot sell copies of the tape! It can only be used for school promotional purposes. There was no amount of money you could pay to license the right to sell the video tape to the parents who attended to see their children in the play. IMHO, that is over the top!

BTW, the school regularly tapes events and then sells DVD’s to parents as a fund raiser for the school. They obviously won’t be doing that for this production.

~jr

ok, were you being sarcastic about the aladdin thing or not? I never understood why the teacher/school unions, state run educational setups, etc. never took those public domain stories & made plays/musicals they could sell to schools cheap & so the schools could help defray costs by sellings videos.

> ok, were you being sarcastic about the aladdin thing or not?

No I was not being sarcastic. The contract the school signed with Disney had an additional charge for video taping and strictly specified that copies of the tape/DVD could not be sold.

To be more exact, the principal told them that they regularly video tape all the events and the Disney rep said that it would cost them extra if they wanted to do that but they couldn’t sell the tape. The principal paid the extra fee so we at least can tape it.

~jr

the TV station I worked at never payed BMI/ASCAP/SESAC for their "small" stations. Pissed me off because then they say "when they call just say "we don't handle that here"", which we did. Never called though.

But would a bar/tavern/whatever be the same w/o music? Hey, 5 years ago is was "would a bar/tavern/whatever" be the same w/o smoking? ;)

I feel for the guy because he was stupid. However, I also feel for him because we don't hear about "a guy was warned 30/50 times over a year what he was doing was wrong & ignored it" on the news (which maybe we should) but honestly, why SHOULD we (or anyone else) pay extra $$ to sing to a song we already pay $$ to play in public? Radio stations don't. I know, like spot said, it's their right, but if you already pay the rights to a song to play on demand in a jutebox, what IS the difference between having it play & someone sing with it? Unless the guy said "Ok, you pay $$ to sing" what did he do wrong? BMI saying "someone sang with the words while the song was playing" is jsut stupid. CD's include lyrics in the case, the words are loud enough to hear, people hum/sing it all the time in public, just not in a bar, but walking down the street, at partys, resturants, while drunk, driving, etc.

I always listen to Spot on these things. He is one of the few that has been on both sides of this equation, and therefore understands both sides from personal experience. One thing for sure, it is NOT a big/small company issue, especially since it is both the BIG company AND the SMALL individual artist that the law is trying to protect.

> if you already pay the rights to a song to play on demand in a jutebox, what IS the difference between having it play & someone sing with it?

Were the songs even on the jukebox or was it a karaoke machine? I don’t know the particulars but it might be that the songs on the Jukebox are licensed from ASCAP but the karaoke was from BMI? Or the songs were not part of the repertoire of the BMI Jukebox license? I don’t know.

Someone asked me once about taking scenes from a DVD to make up a game they were going to play in their bar where you have to guess what happens next, and I told them that they had better get clearance to show those scenes in a public place. They looked at me like, “I’m a small town bar, no one is going to care”. Apparent, someone does as that restaurant owner found out. You gotta ask yourself, is your business worth the risk?

~jr

The answer is simple, and has been eloquently stated many a year ago:

"First, we kill all the lawyers..."

At first I felt for the restaurant owner, esp. since he'll probably go out of business, but that was when I took the "corporate America against the little guy" view, misreading BMI as BMG. DSE is right, BMI/ASCAP are there to protect artists. Without them artist would get nothing. Songwriters would get less than nothing, which as a writer, if you aren't on the top 40, that's about what you get - nothing. This case is about playing a recording in public, which is covered under sync licensing for any such use.

I worked in a church that didn't have a license for showing movie clips, and the one weekend before I started working there, they showed a clip from a movie that wasn't out on DVD.... guess where that came from. I pushed hard to get a license (it wasn't much money at all), and only show clips from DVDs/VHS on the license list, and they did, but it could have been bad news if someone from a film studio walked in (not likely).

The concept of "no harm, no foul" may seem okay in some situations, but consistency in integrity is just as important when paying a multimillion company such as Miramax or NewLine to use a film clip as it is to pay a starving musician for a copy of their CD.

The issue I think we have to watch is how far copyright protection goes towards restricting the listener or buyer in the future. If it goes too far, consumers won't buy it, and artists and writers will be the ones to suffer the most. I'm sure we'll adapt, but it is worth considering how to best directly support the arts and artists we enjoy without too much corporate watering down.

Happyfriar,

I don't understand your arguments.

Radio stations pay licenses for the music they air. TV stations are supposed to pay licenses. A Jukebox and a Karaoke machine are not the same thing. Most places don't have a Karaoke Pay Machine. It is normally just playing the same as entertainment.

Any bar/restaurant that has music entertainment (bands, karaoke or a radio) are required to have a license. That is the law.

You don't have to have a license to sing along with it.

The lyrics on a CD jacket are copyrighted separately from the music.

Dave T2

How many restaurants play music over their sounds system? Has each piece of music they play been licensed? What if it's a radio station they're playing (as many do)?

A restaurant or bar pays a blanket license that covers all music played. These are paid usually to both BMI and ASCAP. Same with a TV station. They just have to report which music is used so that the royalties can be paid to the proper people.

These are not new laws, they have been around for decades. Some places have either chose to ignore them or are naive about them.

Dave T2

I'll just jump in with one comment. It is not about BIG business. Jeez folks. It is actually about small people. The big labels and distribution could survive with just the sales etc. Not like they would want to, but they could. On the other hand, most composers that I know pray for that BMI, ASCAP or SESAC check to come so that they can pay their bills. It is not the sole source of income, but it keeps rthe lights on sometimes.

"First, you kill all the lawyers."

Remember, Shakespeare had his king say that because the king wanted to do away with the rule of law. Without law, the king could do anything he darned well wanted.

OK, so if this isn't about big business screwing the public for profit, who is getting the money from the lawsuit?
One would assume according to Doug's explanation that it would be the artists and not BMI itself. Is that the case?
And I am asking the question in all sincerity because I really DON'T know the answer.

John

Artists get the money from the lawsuit, divided according to the projected frequency of play.
BMI indeed takes some money for the administration of the rights, but it's not a huge chunk, in addition to artists membership, which is very inexpensive. I'm a member of both, ASCAP as a writer and BMI as a publisher. You can't be a member of both as a writer or publisher. We also used to be a member of SESAC until we realized how they operate.
Bottom line is, as artists and publishers, we PAY BMI and ASCAP to do exactly what these guys did. As an artist, I should probably be tweaked at the amount of money that BMI spent sending the guy letters, phone calls, and monitors going to his bar.

"To be more exact, the principal told them that they regularly video tape all the events and the Disney rep said that it would cost them extra if they wanted to do that but they couldn’t sell the tape. The principal paid the extra fee so we at least can tape it."

So help me understand. Is it technically illegal for a parent to tape his kid in a school production for his own use if the school had not paid for the license? Or does each parent have to purchase a license?

Is it technically illegal for a parent to tape kids singing "Happy Birthday" at a 4 year old's party and give a copy of the tape to grandma?

Or is it technically illegal for someone restoring a family video tape for someone (for money) or making a family history DVD for someone from their old VHS tapes, on which someone is singing "Happy Birthday" or "Another One Bites the Dust" is incidentally playing in the background?

Is it technically illegal to tape ANYTHING performed without license if intended for personal use only?

- Just trying to get a handle on all of this. Some of it, especially in these type of situations doesn't seem to make sense, but other sources I've read says these are illegal going by the strictest interpretation of the law. If that's the case, half the country would be in court today.