"I said the hell with it! We only have music on Friday nights. It’s not worth $3000. How is a neighborhood restaurant running on a razor-thin margin in this economy supposed to afford an extra $3000? So I cancelled the band. Net result? Our customers suffered, local music suffered. A complete lose-lose situation."

The bottom line to BMI and other collective rights organizations? Your customers are not your enemies. Promoting live music is good for BMI and the artists they collect royalties for. Working together with local businesses rather than trying to bully and intimidate them will leave all parties better off.

Broadcast Music Incorporated sued Fosters and claimed in court documents that it called the restaurant 56 times and mailed 29 letters. BMI says Fosters ignored its requests to get a license to play music.

"We've been attempting to resolve this for two years now," said Robbin Ahrold, BMI's vice president of corporate communications and marketing. "It is our obligation when we sign an agreement with these songwriters to be diligent and do what we can do to collect their royalties."

Due to your lack of response, BMI found it necessary to have our music researcher conduct our own primary research into the music use [sic] at your business. That music researcher visited your business and confirmed that you are in fact publicly performing music which would require a public performance license.

[BMI] has sued Alley Cat and Andrew Blair's, both in Charlotte, Sharpshooters Sports Bar in Jacksonville, Forty Rod Roadhouse in Mint Hill and White Owl Tavern in Mooresville. WRAL News found a total of 38 suits filed across the country this year.

Any business that sells food and uses goats to lure customers may be violating the trademark, says Lori Meddings, the restaurant's lawyer.

In July, Virginia news outlets reported that goats on a hillside routinely hopped onto a platform under a billboard advertising two International House of Pancakes restaurants. Drivers pulled over to snap pictures, and one IHOP manager was quoted saying he enjoyed the publicity. Mr. Johnson says his lawyer is monitoring the situation in case "they take it a step further." Lisa Hodges, who manages one of the restaurants, says she doesn't plan to intentionally use the goats for marketing. "We can't help it that they climb up there," she says.

Mr. Johnson says the restaurant's Milwaukee law firm has sent letters to other alleged offenders, such as a gift shop in Wisconsin with a fake goat on its roof. It removed the ersatz ungulate.

As readers of our past posts know, the conventional wisdom says that in a system like this no one should innovate. Copyright's raison d'etre is to promote creativity by protecting creators from pirates. But in the food world, pirates are everywhere. By this logic, we ought to be consigned to uninspired and traditional food choices. In short, the Korean taco should not exist.

But the real world does not follow this logic. In fact, we live in a golden age of cuisine. Thousands of new dishes are created every year in the nation's restaurants. The quality of American cuisine is very high. The so-called molecular gastronomy movement has innovated in myriad (and often bizarre) ways that have filtered down to more modest restaurants all over the world. Television shows such as Top Chef and Iron Chef challenge contestants to mix and match improbable combinations of ingredients with little warning or time. Our contemporary food culture, in short, not only offers creativity; it increasingly worships creativity--and many of us worship it right back.

The key point is that culinary creativity is flourishing, and it doesn't depend on copyright. Like fashion, food challenges our preconceptions about the economics of innovation--and perhaps should challenge our legal rules as well.

How likely is it, really, that a patron of the Miami Beach restaurant The Forge is going to be looking for an offshoot of it in New York, when the Miami Beach restaurant hasn't advertised or promoted such an offshoot?

How likely is it that, among the gazillion restaurants in New York, this patron will find his or her way to Mr. Forgione's Forge and, after looking at its rustic, brick-walled setting, mistake it as a sibling to a place in Miami Beach whose waiters apparently wear bow ties?

How many diners are really going to be lining Mr. Forgione's pockets with money that rightfully belongs near the Everglades, or making assumptions about The Forge in Miami Beach based on meals at Forge in TriBeCa? Especially in an Internet era when diners are better informed than ever?