Techdirt is off for the long weekend! We'll be back with our regular posts tomorrow.
An iPod In The Minibar?
from the song-rights? dept
I’ve been doing a lot of traveling lately, and am gearing up for a bit more coming up soon. My sampling of hotels has been an interesting experience, from the high end to the low, but I haven’t yet come across a hotel that offers you an iPod for your music listening pleasure. Apparently, I’m missing out. It’s the latest trend. This seems like an odd amenity for hotels to offer, to be honest. You would think that most people who would be excited about using such a thing would already have their own digital music player. Besides, it also seems like there would be much more efficient ways of getting music into a hotel room, such as a media server that can act as a digital jukebox to the rooms. Still, giving out an iPod gets the press coverage. Also, not clear from the article is what sort of rights need to be obtained from the recording industry to do this. It raises a bunch of questions. Is this a “public” performance? Probably not. However, it is sharing music, and we all know how the recording industry feels about anyone sharing any music without fees being paid.
Comments on “An iPod In The Minibar?”
Sharing?
While it is sharing, it doesn’t seem any different than a library loaning a CD out. As long as the hotels have paid for enough CDs to cover the number of iPods they’ve put the songs on, why would the music industry have a problem with it?
OK, I know the answer ? because they’re the music industry. I’m not an iPod user, so is it possible that people could use iTunes to sync the whole iPod to a laptop they have, thus pirating the music? If so, then I could see why the music industry might worry. However, as mentioned, you’d think most people interested in this would already have an iPod, so they wouldn’t use the hotel’s (unless they wanted to pirate music).
Of course, even if they had an intent to pirate, how would they know what music was on the iPod? Maybe the hotel would have really bad taste in music, or would only put on already popular songs that people already had.
Did anyone actually lookup the company...
… providing the Ipods?
Because I did. If either the poster or Mike had looked them up, you would have seen that Gray V is in the business of creating custom CD’s for businesses (either as Muzak but then cool or as part of a promotional giveaway).
I would venture to guess that ANY such company would have a very, very strong interest in making sure that ALL their music is properly licensed.
Chris.