A Shelton, Ct. restaurant has paid $18,000 to settle a lawsuit over the playing of nine copyrighted songs on its premises; an owner says he thinks a private party played them. “If a band plays a cover song for which the bar has no license, the bar is legally liable, according to BMI and ASCAP,” the two musicians’-rights consortiums that make a practice of suing venues. [Hartford Business]
8 Comments
It’s hard to believe these restaurant owners would plead ignorance of copyright law. If a place uses music to attract paying customers, they’ve got to know that the copyright holders are gonna want their cut. That’s the way business works, and the music business IS a business.
I’m gonna copyright the world’s smallest violin and make a fortune.
All restaurants and places where music is publicly played or performed are required to pay a license fee to ASCAP or BMI, who then distribute the money to its members, who are all creators of music and do not pay a membership fee. TV networks and radio stations pay fees also. It’s small for restaraunts, and the right to use someone else’s creative material to increase your own profits is well worth it. Some places may feel they don’t need this license, so the performing rights organizations help enforce the rules and protect their members from being exploited, by suing them. Despite public perception, this money doesn’t go to big names, pretty faces and big corporations, but is collected by the actual writers of music. You know when someone says that an artist “doesn’t even write his own songs”? That’s often true, but yet the artist is rich and famous, so how do the actual writers get paid? One way is by these companies (ascap is not for profit FYI) protecting the writers material from being unlawfully exploited and making sure the places using music pay their fees.
One place in the article did this. They got sued anyway because they didn’t get it from both. You could get a license from both and still get sued because the writer in question doesn’t belong to either. (There was a case where ASCAP had some labels drop some songs out, and then refused to tell Pandora what was no longer covered by their license, in an effort to “negotiate” higher rates under threat of the lawsuit that would happen if they played one of those unknown songs.) Is a restaurant owner seriously supposed to sit there and vet every song a musician wants to play to make sure it’s on the list?
I would assume that the artist (or his label) would pay the writer for the rights to record the song. I’m also with Lee in that it seems like the person actually performing the song without rights should be the one in trouble, when it comes to live music, instead of the owner of the place it happens to be played.
Yes, they do, and they should… which is why it seems to be double-dipping to also charge a place for tuning in to that station.
I understand why songwriters should be compensated by musicians playing copyrighted songs, but what does the restaurant have to do with it? Why isn’t the law written so that the musicians themselves are responsible for obtaining the rights to the songs they play?
After all, if as an author I plagiarize another author’s book, my publisher and I are the ones who will get sued. The bookstores that sold my book will not have to pay the price for my crime, other than the money they’re already out for my books they haven’t sold yet, and often not even that.
If a customer plays music on their laptop does that qualify as a public performance?
But the engineers who designed all the technology that makes all this posisble do not get a dime for helping the artistically-minded make more money. Oh, maybe they get a little bit for a few years under patent law, but not nearly as long as someone who pens a little ditty.
I wonder if the copyright holders of “Happy Birthday to You” go after restaurants for singing it to customers.
rxc, they probably do, or at least restaurants are afraid they will. I’ve never actually heard restaurant staff sing that exact song. I’ve always heard them sing different birthday songs.