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No, but whoever publishes it owes songwriters around the world shitloads of royalties for including words from their songs...

http://www.oed.com/subscribe/ [oed.com]
 

and your spell checker gets a module that suggests cheaper words to use in your sentences. And it takes in account the extra tax on words the government doesn't like. You can still write what you want but some things are really costly..

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?

"That's what this is."

This is a natural outcome of applying the concept of private property to information.

Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which makes it a tool of commerce.

Sounded to me like they'd use a radio in the back that just happened to be in earshot of the front. This is opposed to the full speaker array across the store that keeps the place from being too quiet.

That's more akin to being charged a performance licence for your car radio while your windows are rolled down.

The thing is, the songwriters have already been paid - by the radio station. If it's BBC radio, we've already paid for that music out of our annual licence fee, or it's a commercial station with adverts. Every person in that store has the right to listen to that station already as the broadcast fees have already been paid.

Now that it's suddenly being able to be listened to while on a store premises, it's a 'new' public performance and more money needs to be paid. It's double dipping for the same performance.

You want to charge stores that play personal CDs through to customers? Fine. But leave my goddamn radio at my desk alone.

I've worked in the past as a musician and songwriter, and I was in radio for most of a decade. I am a published author and editor, and currently make my living as a writer.

And I say this is utter horseshit.

People do not go to grocery stores to hear Muzak. They go there to buy food.

The radio stations and music services already pay royalties in any case, and places that play recorded music in-house have already paid for those recordings. And that's where it should end.

To take your model to its logical conclusion is to suggest that, because I can hear some kid's iPod on the train because he's got it cranked up loud enough to turn his brains into jelly, either he or I should pay royalties, which is preposterous. You may claim otherwise, but this is *exactly* where it leads.

Next, you'll be telling me I should pay a performance fee whenever I read to my daughter from a copyrighted book.

Disclaimer: 'Muzak' and 'iPod' are registered trademarks of their respective owners, and they are completely welcome to them.

> Everyone here is going to talk about how outrageous it is for a supermarket
> to be charged for playing the radio, but the fact of the matter is that they
> use the radio to create a pleasant environment for their customers, which
> makes it a tool of commerce.

Yes, and so is the building itself, the paint to make the walls look nice, and much more.

Should the builders, paint manufacturers, etc. get 'royalties' because you use their products commercially?

I don't think so. So "used as a tool of commerce" is just not a valid argument.

Just as with the building/paint/what's in the building, the radio has already been paid for. Via tax (as in NL) and/or the radio stations which pay to transmit. Everyone can freely listen to the radio privately, so why should anyone have to pay to use it in a store?

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.

Let me repeat myself from other posts I've made in the past: the fact that you write stuff down on a piece of paper and send it to somebody does not entitle you to a check. Since this is a tech site, I'll compare this to writing software: just because you wrote some software doesn't mean that you're entitled to receive money. I don't care what the size is of the check is. Software writers are at least ahead of the curve and trying various methods to entice people to pay them directly. What I see from song writers instead is "I wrote some stuff that's used somewhere, pay me forever. And I deserve to be paid enough to not have to do anything else."

To that I can only say one thing: fuck off. I write a ton of crap. Some of it is good, some of it isn't, but I know it makes a difference. Some of it is specific to the situation and the client, some of it is generic and useful to everyone in the field. I do not expect to get paid in perpetuity for my writing, and I don't expect some third party entity to hunt down documents that kinda look like mine, or people who have something that looks like my document without proof they paid for it.

That's how it ought to be. You do work, you get paid. Wanna get paid again? Do more work. Which, by the way, is how art used to be compensated. And plenty of awesome work was created through that system - work that is arguably better than about 99.99% of the crap that came out in the last 10 years, when copyright enforcement truly started to get nuts.

To people outside the UK, charging you for playing the radio makes no damn sense. After all, the radio station already pays for the music (if it's a standard broadcast) or *you* already pay for the music if it's satellite or CD.

The only reason people like the OP can rationalize the PRS is because they're looking at it through the lens of a culture in which it's the status quo. You see this all the time - people rationalizing or even praising elements of their particular culture that MAKE NO GODDAMN SENSE. I'm not sure whether it's done out of a sort of misplaced nationalism, a lack of imagination, or something else. But it's the only explanation I can think of for the defense of the indefensible, whether it's the PRS, the American health care system, or any other country's unique psychosis.

The irony is that for the vast majority of musicians in the UK, the burden the PRS puts on people is vastly disproportionate to the benefit received. Again, take the original poster - would s/he give up that one dinner a year in order to save business owners the incredible hassle of dealing with the PRS? Not to mention the massive amount of money the PRS must spend on enforcement, which reduces the artists' cut. If the PRS moved to a system where royalties for recording sales and broadcast were higher, and eliminated the tax on playing music in public, how much more profitable would they be?

The company didn't realize anything. They were cowed into submission by an understandably outraged public.

They are testing the waters.

You got moderated funny.

Read the appalling truth [bbc.co.uk].