Singer In Grocery Store Ordered To Pay Royalties 645
yog writes "An assistant at a grocery store in Clackmannanshire, Scotland, was ordered by the Performing Right Society (PRS) to obtain a performer's license and to pay royalties because she was informally singing popular songs while stocking groceries. The PRS later backed down and apologized. This after the same store had turned off the radio after a warning from the PRS. We have entered an era where music is no longer an art for all to enjoy, but rather a form of private property that must be regulated and taxed like alcohol. 'Music to the ears' has become 'dollars in the bank'."
Hoax (Score:3, Interesting)
And the birds hired copy write lawyers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Totally, irrevocably, utterly batshit insane (Score:5, Interesting)
This is an example of media control gone nuts. Didn't someone in jest say about 3 years ago that this would happen, somewhere in the world?
Re:The radio makes senes, but not the singer (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in college, I worked in a restaurant where initially we played the radio in the kitchen for employees during slow hours. At some point, we received a warning letter, so we got rid of the radio, which only employees could hear, and replaced it with a speaker system that played throughout the restaurant. We then changed the policy so that only cds brought in by employees could be played over the speakers. As far as I know (havent worked there in 3 years), they still don't pay anything for doing so.
Re:What the...... (Score:3, Interesting)
Intellectual property and physical property are not equivalent and considering the former an extension of the latter confuses the issue. Your physical property rights do not legally bar me from making a copy of your car, should I have the means, only from depriving you of yours.
In such a fantasy scenario, should we extend copyright law to cover the copying of physical objects in that manner, it would be just as much an interference with the natural tendencies of the free market, and thus less capitalist.
Re:What the...... (Score:3, Interesting)
They are different yet related, and laws which protect physical property forbid me from borrowing it or, in the case of land, traversing it even when doing so deprives you of nothing. (E.g., if I squat in a building you aren't using, or cross your property to get to the other side, etc.) All property rights are legal fictions enforced by governments.
Markets are not "natural." They are human creations and activities, as are polities. People have been creating "governments" for longer than they have been participating in markets.
Re:What's next? (Score:5, Interesting)
The woman had already had her radio taken away as the shop did not have a license to broadcast either CDs (which they had paid for) or Radio (which is already paid for - either by the BBCs 'cat all television license' or by advertising). This form of double payment is incredulous at best, in cases such as these where a claim is being made the business should pay extra to act as a proxy for a service designed to increase add revenue to the industry (Why is the music industry not paying private businesses to play the music in promotion?).
With nothing else to listen too the woman would sing while stacking the shelves. How is that going to encourage business in a local corner shop. I have no doubt she is an aweful singer. Second to that, how is this costing the music industry anything? What losses are they claiming back?
They do already. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.oed.com/subscribe/ [oed.com]
Re:What the...... (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't really address my argument though. I wasn't arguing that markets are natural, but instead that free markets have natural tendencies. In other words, if we have a market that is a free market, we can expect it to behave in a certain way until it is interfered with by regulation rendering it no longer a free market. The artificiality of markets and laws is not at issue.
Re:The company apologized (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy solution - Make $$$$ from it. (Score:5, Interesting)
How hard would it be for some enterprising radio station to only play GPL/Free/Whatever-isn't-commercial music that the PRS had no jurisdiction over...
They would quickly be the ONLY radio station that business could listen to ( freely ) and they could sue the PRS if they damaged their business by telling people they couldn't listen to the radio without a license... Since it wouldn't be true of that station. ( Better still the PRS might start to include advertising in their notices... eg, Can't listen to stations, other than Radio-GPL )
A captive market and a litigious company doing them free PR work - It doesn't get much better than that...
I wonder how long the PRS would last before the artists realized they were the real enemy...
GrpA
Re:What the...... (Score:5, Interesting)
All property rights are legal fictions enforced by governments.
Real property rights often have some justification even without the legal fiction, and they have reflections in social codes.
That taking a piece of property deprives someone of that property can be demonstrated even without any law. There's a strong social code against it, even beside the law. Borrowing on the other hand is much less clear-cut which is also reflected in social code, where refusing to lend something may be frowned upon, even while the ownership is clearly established.
In the case of land there's a wide variation of law; many countries do not have any restriction against crossing someone's land, and more countries seem to be moving towards roaming rights. In some countries you're free to pick all the berries and mushrooms you want on private land; if they want it, they should indicate it through fencing or signs (which is a demonstrable economic gain; unused resources get utilized at no loss to anyone else). Again, a reflection of demonstrable natural situations valid even without the presence of law.
Intellectual 'property' on the other hand, has no such natural expression. Without the actual law there is no demonstrable harm. In fact, the law itself contradicts natural social rules as it prevents maximization of both freedom and experienced wealth, causing demonstrable harm to everyone who is prevented to perform, copy or display things that would cause nobody else harm.
Ultimately intellectual 'property' laws are counter productive and damaging to the economy. Without being founded in social codes they have no real justification and ignoring them is never 'wrong', it may even be a moral duty, even if it may be 'illegal'.
PRS and its quest to take more money (Score:1, Interesting)
PRS needs to be shutdown then (Score:2, Interesting)
If this is what they are spending their time doing - and more importantly that they feel this is acceptable - then they no longer serve any contributory, useful purpose and must be shut down. In fact all such organizations should be shut down.
Re:What the...... (Score:3, Interesting)
and it takes away the right of everyone else to do what they wish with their property, including copying, modifying and displaying it.
False, copyright is a distribution license, you can make derivative works all day long but you can't distribute them without permission. You have a legal right under First Sale law to modify and resell things you purchase and copyright law only requires that you transfer all copies at the same time. You are ostensibly free to purchase an album, remix it and sell it, so long as you include the original album with every remixed copy, without even gaining permission. I don't know that anyone has ever tried, though. Of course, this is all as applies to US law, but it's the vision of law we push across the globe. Certainly every nation we "liberate" is forced into it, and you won't get any vaccinations from the Gates foundation without providing at least strong IP protection to pharmaceuticals.
Re:What the...... (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, one of the political parties in my country has taken the position that we can spend literally trillions of dollars on wars on multiple fronts, tens of billions more on a war against drugs, more on keeping a tremendous fraction of its population in prison, AND THAT DOING THIS WHILE REDUCING THE SIZE OF GOVERNMENT TO A TRIVIAL FRACTION IS POSSIBLE.
The other major party just might be addressing these problems a little, and they generally don't advocate actually reducing the government to a tiny fraction of what's needed, but they agree with the first party that they can keep up these programs WHILE EVENTUALLY AVOIDING ANY MORE DEFICIT SPENDING.
Neither is a sane, healthy position, even though one is obviously a full blown delusional psychosis and the other might marginally qualify as just a case of being neurotic enough to only function at a modest percentage of potential, if things stay routine and the stress doesn't get too bad.
It's called cognitive dissonance. A news channel simultaneously says they're the most popular source in the world, AND their viewers are a small, persecuted minority. Businesses say they want free markets but need special government protections for their business models.
That's why I dislike it when people say "in the real world" about these things. If that much of the real world really believes such self contradictory ideas, that doesn't somehow magically make them sustainable. It just means 'the real world' is headed for chaos.
Re:What's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
What does her singing ability . . . or your imagined imapct on her business . . . have to do with this. Assuming you know fuck-all about it.
Re:Easy solution - Make $$$$ from it. (Score:1, Interesting)
But we have got something very similar: our version of the BBC has started making a lot of its material accessible via the web. So suddenly everybody who owns a computer and has an internet connection is required to pay the TV-reciever fee....
In Finland there has been plans to do the same but now a surprisingly non-retarded solution seems to emerge: When you pay your TV licence, you get a user ID for accessing content on our public service television's site (and part of the content there remains free for everyone). I still object strongly to having a TV licence fee because it's wrong to charge for owning a TV regardless of whether you watch the public service channels but if having Internet access won't require you to pay that fee, it at least won't make the situation worse. Personally, I got rid of my TV long ago since it is mostly a waste of time and there's so much available on the web and lately I've discovered that libraries have quite good DVD collections.
Re:It's amazing what people accept... (Score:2, Interesting)
In a similar vein, a socialized health care system makes no sense to people in the USA given that their culture.
I always hated having to pay USD$300 a year to the UK government just because I wanted to use a TV + cable/sky or whatever else. I also hated how the system was handled, a guy once asked me to enter to my house to check that I didn't have a TV (because I never paid the license).
I like the USA people's idea that the government must left the individual live. However, in the case of the UK I think the government is actively screwing their citizens in lots of respects. OTOH, I loved the NHS while I had it... and I think the commercialized health insurance and education systems in the USA are completely insane.
Re:Brainwashing (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoa, whoa. You have songs in your head?
Did you pay the licensing fee for them? Lawyers are on their way to you now.
What really gives me the creeps. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hoax (Score:5, Interesting)
The way they work is that if a pub puts on bands and the pub is not a member of the PRS, they have to prove that no cover versions of PRS artists were played. This means that a pub owner effectively has to know every song ever registered with a publishing company in order to police this and legally opt out of the system. They can, and will, be asked to provide set-lists in their defence. So what do they do, they stop putting on live music as its too much hassle. What's even worse is that say a band covers one of my songs, then the PRS will collect royalties on my behalf whether I want them to or not. You cannot opt out as a musician either (so those of you who blame greedy musicians for this situation as well, please think again)
Not only are the record companies killing recorded music, the PRS and their ilk are killing live music.
Re:Totally, irrevocably, utterly batshit insane (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's next? (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, "loser pays" isn't really a sufficient defense against bad litigators who are corporations. Because unlike your average citizen, they have lawyers either on staff or on retainer, so their upfront legal costs are nothing. Even when the citizen wins, they only have to pay the fees for a lawyer that he/she could afford, which makes the whole thing an exercise in cost/benefit calculation, heavily weighted towards litigation.
On top of this, the individual not only has to pay their lawyer up front, but even if they win they are out a significant amount of time (and who knows, they may lose their job if they miss too much work) and seemingly endless frustration.
In my opinion the best solution for this is to provide some sort of "pain and suffering" award in cases where a company sues an individual, pushing the weight of the cost/benefit calculation firmly in the direction of not litigating in cases like this.
Re:Totally, irrevocably, utterly batshit insane (Score:3, Interesting)