Firstly, THIS IS NOT ABOUT THE U.S.! Please will you Americans realise that you are not the only country on the planet. So anything we discuss now about US copyright law has no relevance to the larger debate about the UK barber.

Secondly, limiting the copyright on an artist’s work for them is *not* going to encourage them to make more work for the public. If they want to create work for the public, they can just do that and give away the copyright to public bodies straight away.

I understand what you are saying about the wording, though the fact that it is securing the exclusive rights for the authors/inventors, even if only for a limited time, shows that it is about respecting that they do have rights to their work. In the UK, copyright generally expires 50 years after the work is published/released:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988

I don’t know (or in this particular case care) what the period is for the US at the moment.

If there were actual double dipping taking place, then I would agree that it’s wrong. But as I’ve explained, it’s not. The PRS license that the barber legally requires is not the same as the PPL license that he legally requires, nor are either of those the same as the PRS and PPL licenses that the radio station is required to have.

If you can’t/won’t recognise the difference, arguing with YOU is a complete waste of time.

And there is no issue here of anyone charging for music that they are not the rights holder of. As in the original article that this page is taken from, the barber was found to have been playing particular tracks that were the PPL *WAS* a representative of.

“So you believe there is no problem with denying an individual the ability to make use of their own products (radio) to capture public goods (radio waves) on their own property?”

It’s irrelevant really as that’s not what’s happened here. Radio waves specifically sent by someone are not ‘public goods’, they are copyrighted intellectual property, just like physical or digital recordings.

As for what you can do on your own property, the law has never worked like that. In neither the US nor the UK nor many other countries can you murder someone on your own property, for instance (there are sometime exceptions for self-defence but they apply whether in public or private). If you are in a country, you have to obey the laws or face the consequences.

“You say this as if before he bought the radio he had to sign an agreement. He did not.”

He didn’t need to. UK laws regarding broadcast of copyrighted work to the public already exist. It is every individual’s and every business’s responsibility to know the laws of the country they are in. Ignorance does not hold up in court (unless you are very lucky!).

“When the Mafia stops by your shop and says you need to pay up for “protection” to make sure “nothing bad happens,” does the store owner who pays up “agree” with the mafia?”

This has no relevance to this case. Nobody forced the barber to play the music. He just got fined for not having the legally required license for it. He chose to play the music.

“My point all along has been how nonsensical the law is. You have not responded to that. Any time anyone calls you on it you resort back to “but that’s the law!” That’s not an answer.”

OK, so why do you think it is nonsensical, sorry? Do you not agree that copyright holders should be able to charge as they like for the use of their work? Do you not agree that broadcasting copyrighted work in public should be treated differently than doing so in private?

“Yes, and once we had a law that said slavery was okay and that alcohol was not. And you would have been among those who said “the law is the law, so deal with it.”

No, I’d’ve said if you don’t like it, simply don’t partake in it. Comparing slavery and prohibition to music broadcast licensing is ridiculous though.

Charging fees is hardly the same as killing people. Get a grip!

Yes, it counts, according to the UK legislation:

http://www.prsformusic.com/users/businessesandliveevents/musicforbusinesses/Pages/doineedalicence.aspx

Note that they do do exceptions for some shops (section 4).

Would it be different if someone brought in a portable radio? Probably not.

If I write a song and I let the PPL take care of my publishing royalties (for a fee out of the income they obtain for me), then they have the authority to act whenever any recordings of my song are broadcast.

He tried to comply by signing up with the Performing Rights Society, but not with Phonographic Performance Limited. It was an unfortunate mistake but a mistake nevertheless. I don’t think any legal speak hid anything from him – we don’t know how he found out the PRS but he ought to have found out about the PPL at the same time. Or maybe the PRS should have reminded him about the PPL. But it’s not their responsibility to do that – it’s his.

I’ve made the odd mistake with my own company, and I’ve paid for it. I didn’t go to the media about it though.

I guess not. If he had just played music that was signed up to the PRS or PPL, they wouldn’t have been able to fine him.

No, because if you have headphones on, for instance, you are not broadcasting it to others, and more importantly, there are various exceptions to the legislation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright,_Designs_and_Patents_Act_1988#Miscellaneous

Or to be fair, just blame your parents as they will have decided where you are born…

“In Mississippi, for example, I can legally kill someone if I catch them vandalizing my car.”

Really? The state law still thinks that’s OK?! Does it happen often?

“OK, so why do you think it is nonsensical, sorry?

We’re 250 comments in and you still haven’t figured it out?”

Nope, I’m afraid not. It makes perfect sense to me that if you play the song that I wrote and my friend recorded to the public at your business premises (which enhances your working conditions and/or your customer satisfaction), that we are each paid at the amounts that we have set, and if we want to use agencies to help monitor this and collect the fees, what’s wrong with that?

“how a gov’t granted agency with gov’t set prices has anything to do with your claim that copyright holders get to charge what they want”

Um, well, the copyright holders have signed agreements with that agency, that’s how. Either they have chosen the rates themselves, or they’ve agreed to the rates of the agency. In any case, an agreement, that they had a choice about, is in place.

“I believe that the market sets the price — and that’s the intersection of supply and demand. A rights holder can try to set the price, but if the product is in abundant supply, then that price gets pushed down by the market. But the government has stepped in and denied market forces in htis situation.”

Not true – there’s nothing stopping another company starting their own agency. The law doesn’t give any special privileges to the PRS or PPL, they are just the most popular services of their kind in the UK and because they cover the vast majority of popular music and have agreements with lots of public venues, it makes sense to sign up with them either as an artist or broadcaster.

“Turning on a radio is not ‘broadcasting’.”

Sorry but if you are running a business and the public can hear the licensed music on the radio at your premises, then it is broadcasting in so much that you need a license to do it legally. Whatever the term used.

And my ‘just don’t do it’ argument was not ‘just don’t break the law’, but in fact ‘don’t do the thing that you don’t want to pay for’. It’s a free market – if you don’t like the price of a product (or in this case licensing a product), you don’t have to buy it at all.

Fine, maybe the PPL needs to a better job of making sure everyone is aware that they represent a lot of popular music. But you have to be pretty naive if you just assume you can do what you like with someone else’s music just because it’s on the radio. I’m not saying you need to read all the laws, but I do find it odd that if he found out about the PRS, he somehow missed the PPL, as they will be listed in similar places.

No, you don’t need the licenses – the business does as its their premises!

And it’s not really a case of ‘suing’, they just need to issue the fines, which it seems they are gradually doing at the moment. If people don’t want to pay the fines, they can object and only then will the PPL potentially take them to court. The law that comes into play is that you need permission of the copyright holder to play their music in public – I doubt that one is going to be easily changed.

How does stupid come into it?

Businesses that use licensed music (whether played from a CD, iPod, online streaming service or from regular radio) to enhance their physical environment, either for employees, customers, or both, should pay for the privilege. This is perfectly fair – recorded music doesn’t grow on trees.

Sharing links to material online is *completely different* than playing licensed music in a commercial property to members of the public without permission. This is a pathetic attempt at trying to make me look like a hypocrite when at no point have I condemned sharing online links. You DO NOT NEED A LICENSE to post a URL to something else online.

Lending music recordings is perfectly legal in the UK, by the way. It’s copying, hiring/renting, public performances (i.e. playing publicly) and/or broadcasting (i.e. over the air or via wires) that are illegal. Try reading the small print on any commercial CD if you don’t believe me.

The purpose of (UK) copyright is both to ensure the creators retain their moral rights to their work with the support of the law for a reasonable amount of time (generally 50 years for the UK), but also to relinquish those rights, legally, after the period so that the works can be used by all for the greater good/education/progress etc.

It’s not just one or the other, as if it were just about protecting the rights of creators, progress would be slowed down, but on the other hand, if it were just about make everything available to everyone, there would be little incentive for people to create things if they don’t get any personal gain from it. So the UK law provides a balance that most people who actually create stuff agree is fair.

Maybe not, but seems likely that he did as they’d have no means to randomly stumble upon the news.

Well yeah, if your teachers/school don’t do anything about it, clearly there’s a problem with the school and you’ll get a better education if you go to a different school instead.

Weird example.

No, what I said was she should have boycotted the service and used another one that wasn’t racist instead (or if another service wasn’t available, get together with other people affected and start their own service). It wasn’t a free bus, was it?! As I said, if everyone affected took a stand, it would get noticed. Businesses care about profits more than anything else.

“By the same logic, if I play your song at my business and it gets you attention such that people now what to go to your concert/hire you to write new songs, you are going to pay me right? After all, it enhances your working conditions/salary/living conditions. Nothing wrong with that, right?”

Sure, if we’ve got an agreement along those lines in the licensing contract. If we haven’t, you can attempt to negotiate with my licensing agency if you like. But if they or I decide against it, sorry but that’s our decision – it’s our music to do what we want with.

“Or, wait, does this only work in one direction?”

That really depends on your negotiating skills, Mike. The ball’s in your court if you want to try and get it agreed.

“Can you point me to a single collection society (hell, just PPL or PRS) that lets musicians set their own rates? They don’t. The rates are set by the Copyright Tribunal in the UK.”

Only when there is a dispute. But the point is, musicians don’t have to use collection societies if they don’t want to. If they don’t like the rates being used, they don’t have to use them.

Just found this by the way – http://www.ppluk.com/en/Music-Users/Playing-Music-and-Videos-In-Public/Health–Beauty/

It turns out the barber would have only needed to pay £116.20 ex. VAT per year to have the PPL license to play music from radio and TV at his premises. Hardly a fortune!

“Highly misleading. It is only in the past two years that the European courts rejected national monopolies on collection societies. But because the established players already had a monopoly it’s close to impossible for any new entrant to qualify.

Qualify for what, sorry?

“Both had gov’t sanctioned monopolies until the courts broke that up recently, at which point it no longer mattered. Why you ignore this, I do not know.”

Because as you say, it no longer matters. We’re talking about a current case, not an old case.

“There’s no free market when you have a government tribunal setting prices, Dave. There’s no free market when you have a government granting a monopoly. There’s no free market when you have monopoly rights handed out to content creators.”

Sure there is. The tribunal has set the prices for one particular society. Not for all of them. http://www.ppluk.com/en/Music-Users/Copyright-Tribunal-Refunds/

There’s nothing stopping the barber using an alternative collection society that represents other artists, or just dealing with the artists directly, or only playing his own music that he records himself at the weekend, or not playing any music at all, or just paying the £116.20 which will probably be less than 0.1% of his business’ turnover.

“Those rates are statutory, so the copyright holders are not able to ‘charge as they like.’ Most would like to get paid more, I’m sure, but those statutory rates are set by law.”

Of course they can – they just need to stop using that society. Any rates that have been set by the UK government have been in the case of dispute between the businesses that pay the fees and societies representing the copyright holders. If the copyright holders don’t like the rate their society has ended up with, they can just stop using the society and collect the rate they want themselves or using another society instead. They’re not forced into those rates.

“Plus, you have mostly ignored the fact that copyright holders have already charged for that broadcast – they charged the broadcasters themselves (the radio stations). Rights holders are getting paid twice for exactly the same transmission. That’s the very definition of ‘double dipping.’ If it’s the law, then the law should be changed.”

No, that’s not true. You’re implying that being paid twice means ‘double’ the amount. The reality is that, for instance, a copyright holder receives around £75 per play of their recording on the big BBC stations, from the stations themselves. Whereas a small business like the barber may only pay £100 or so for the right to play as much music as they like for an entire year. So realistically the artist will receive a few pennies for this, on top of their £75. That is not ‘double’ dipping.

“The barber shop isn’t a ‘broadcaster’ because they can’t select the music,”

Er, yes they can. They can put on a CD, an iPod, fire up Spotify etc. The license that the barber didn’t have covered the playing of all music, whether or not broadcast over the radio to the shop.

“can’t decide to skip station ID’s or ads, etc.”

Sure they can, they can mute these if they really want. Or switch to another station. Radio sets *do* have buttons that let you control them.

“Re-broadcasting of a specific radio transmission in public should be no different than doing so in private.”

Why, sorry?

And yes, things are different in the UK and US. I’m glad someone’s finally picked up on that.

“but it should be the performers obligation to compensate the writer for their work” – sorry but that’s not how it works in the UK. If you write a song for me, I might pay you a fixed amount, say £5,000, to buy it from you forever. Or I might license it from you for, say, £500 a year, to use it as I like, but the rights remain with you. Or I might not have your specific permission to use it, but because you’re signed up with a publishing society, a small fee is due every time my recording of it gets played on TV, on radio, online, or performed by me at my gigs. Or you might have given the song to the public domain so anyone can use it without your permission. It really comes down to whatever agreement is in place.

“And the publisher, pretty sure that’s the record company THAT THE RADIO STATION IS ALREADY PAYING.” – no, not necessarily. Publishers are usually not also recording companies, though sometimes one might own another. But in most cases they are separate and UK copyright law recognises both the writer/creator and the performer of the recording/live performance.

“That’s not what you said earlier. You claimed this was all justified ethically and morally because businesses are using music to draw in customers and make money.

Now you’re saying it’s justified merely because the artist made the music.”

In the case of ethics/morals, I’d say both reasons are valid. In the case of the law, the latter is what counts.

“what gives artists the right to get paid over and over again forever for work they did once while no one else in society has that privilege?”

The law does! But I don’t agree that nobody else has that privilege. If I start a shop, and then start another as it’s going well, and then train my staff to start more stores on my behalf, and eventually end up with a chain, I will get to the point where I get paid over and over again for work that I did at the start of the process.

If I come up with a secret recipe for cookies, and they are so popular that everyone in the country buys them every day, I will ‘get paid over and over again forever for work I only did once’. Or if I invent a new clothes hangar that becomes very popular, I will ‘get paid over and over again forever for work that I did once’. It’s not just ‘art’, it designs, it’s ideas, it’s patents… it’s all forms of intellectual property. The whole concept of successful business is built upon getting good at something and then ‘getting paid over and over again forever for work I did once’ at the start of the process. Like a doctor spends years at medical school at great expense so he/she can earn a good salary for the rest of their life once they are qualified. In your example, the doctor would have spent/invested time/money into learning how to set a broken leg in the first place, and then every time she has to do it for a new patient, she gets paid for it again.

“Yet when it comes to art, there’s this presumption that it just makes sense to keep paying people for work they did decades ago.”

Well, maybe the UK copyright expiry period could be adjusted from 50 years to say, 20 years, or less, but the argument is that if you push it too far, the artists will have less incentive to create new work and society will lose out as a whole.

In which country/with which collection society are these cases, sorry?

A shop is still a shop – i.e. business premises.

Why didn’t they advise him? Because that’s not their responsibility. Because they weren’t to know whether he already had a PPL license? It’s the barbers incompetence, not theirs.

Your classical music advice is great. Or he could just pay the £116.20 annual license fee to the PPL and not have to worry. Hardly an extortionate amount to potentially play over 130,000 licensed tracks over a year.

No, again, UK radio stations do not necessarily broadcast paid commercials, and even if they do, they are unlikely to be able to gain any extra income having them broadcast at businesses because those radios won’t be sampled by the people working out the average listening figures (which can determine the amount that they advertisers pay).

Maybe they could do that, but I don’t think many businesses are actually complaining about the licensing fees. The barber’s PPL license would have cost £116.20 ex. VAT per year, which is probably about 0.1% of his turnover. Hardly a fortune.

So why is it 50 years in the UK (before it expires), instead of say, 5?

If I’m creating something, giving me control over it (for a set amount of time) does give me an incentive to create it. It’s no coincidence, for me at least. If I had no control over it, I would be unlikely to bother at all.

What about “while returning value to creators so that they can lead a dignified economic existence”? Without control, they won’t get that value (at an amount determined by them) returned to them.

And I couldn’t really care what the purpose of copyright was devised as 301 years ago. Things have moved on, and more to the point, laws have changed.

How is it not moral? The music doesn’t belong to the business, so the business has no right to use it without permission.

Read all my comments on this page. I’ve said plenty about why I think it’s fair that the barber should have paid the appropriate license fees to play licensed music on his business premises.

CDs aren’t ‘dead’. Sales may be declining but that doesn’t make them dead. That’s all I said, coward.

Because companies DON’T HAVE TO play the music if they don’t like the rates.

Artists aren’t forced to use those bodies or the bodies’ set rates. Artists can charge whatever they like, be it nothing at all, or a million pounds per play. Nothing forces them to use a particular collection society.

“You can’t choose what artists the station plays.”

No, but you can choose not to play the radio at all.

“statutory licensing is exactly like the government saying ‘your wages will be collected by someone else, and they can’t charge your clients more than x per hour.'”

Except that in this case you have made the free choice to use the ‘someone else’. If you don’t like their rates, don’t use them.

All I’ve talked about is the truth/reality of the UK law and what happened in this case. The very existence of this article annoyed me, which is why I commented on it. The headline should just have been:

“UK Hairdresser Fined For Playing Music After Not Getting Required License”

which is the reality of the situation. Or maybe even:

“UK Hairdresser Fined For Playing Music After Half-Arsed Attempt To Be Legal”

True, but there were manufacturing and distribution costs involved with physical sales which aren’t present with digital. And sure, CD singles were generally 2 or 3 track packages (for the £2 or £3 price), whereas now the tracks can be bought individually.

How am I hosting it, sorry? The content is not on my page on Facebook, it’s just a link! Sharing a link is not distributing the content contained.

For your information, the MBF was shut down a few years ago and my project for them (building them a website) never got finished or paid for. So you could argue that I might actually have a grudge against them, not be biased towards them.

But again, I’m just pointing out the laws as they stand in the UK, because I’m aware of them (whereas most people commenting on this clearly are/were not).

Sorry but as I look at this page, none of the points are numbered so I don’t know which points you mean.

“So you’re against the effort to extend performance rights in the UK?”

I don’t really have a position on this, certainly not one that is relevant here. I suppose I would extend them if possible, for music at least, because it’s now very cheap to license music for commercial use and if you want to use if commercially, that’s very different to the public having access to it to help further cultural progress etc. Generally speaking educational establishments can use work for study irrespective of copyright anyway, so the length of performance rights for commercial use has no effect on this.

“The most recent study from the folks at Harvard showed that as copyright law was enforced less, MORE content creation came about.”

Interesting, did they have any theories as to why this was?

“…in which he notes that there are many incentives outside of monetary incentives for creation.”

Sure, I’ve never claimed it’s all about money, just control.

“We’ve spent years and years on this site demonstrating business models…”

Please tell me more about them. If the artist has no right over their content, I don’t understand how they can make any money from the content.

“So are you willing to step back from your unsubstantiated comment that copyright law is somehow necessary to give content creators the incentive to create? The actual evidence says you’re wrong.”

Show me how content creators can earn a living from their content when they don’t have any rights over their content (and are not simply selling the rights to someone else) and sure, I’ll retract what I said.

“…ways for creators to gain from their work”

Exactly, so they still have a way to gain from their work. They write/record some songs, put them out for free (which they have the choice to do, thanks to the choice given to them by copyright), people like them, so buy their swag/tickets etc. and the creators still get their personal gain. They still have an incentive.

Why should we encourage new business models over the existing ones? There’s nothing outdated about having to gain permission to use someone else’s work. Just because it’s easy to copy it, that doesn’t make it right to do so.

And just because you can copy my work to everyone on the planet, it doesn’t mean I should receive nothing for my efforts. There are not an infinite number of listeners to my work, and even if there were, 0 is never a ‘fair market price’ – 0 is not a price at all. And by the way way, my music is a scarce good – only I can make/grow it.

Your anonymity is a real worry.

Wow, the very definition of a bigot!

Sorry Marcus but I’d never seen this site before – got alerted to this article by a friend on Twitter. Didn’t realise I had to be a regular to have an opinion or spell out the FACTS.