Posted on 09/15/2014 9:32:57 AM PDT by Dallas59
Warner Bros. has filed a lawsuit against a small bar from Amityville, New York, for playing one of their songs without permission. The track in question is not a recent pop song, but the 80-year old love song "I Only Have Eyes for You" which first appeared in Warner's 1934 movie "Dames."
giacomoMany bars, pubs and restaurants like to entertain their guests with live music, with bands often playing covers of recent hits or golden oldies.
As with all music that’s performed in public, the bar owners are required to pay the royalties, even if there are just handful of listeners present.
Royalty collection agencies take this obligation very seriously and drive around the country visiting local bars and pubs to check whether they obey the law. Those who don’t usually get a bill in the mailbox, and if they refuse to pay up it gets worse.
(Excerpt) Read more at torrentfreak.com ...
To me, the issue isn’t the protection. If someone produces a popular song, that is intellectual property and should be paid for. The crazy part to me is how long Congress keeps the protection going. They keep extending and extending, primarily at the behest of Disney, to the point where it goes on forever.
A local Putt-Putt style golf course, been in business since the 60’s, named Goofy Golf. They had a sign that had a ‘Goofy’ character on it that looked like Disney’s Goofy. They had to get rid of the sign, but could keep the name................
True story.
We had the licensing rights to a UK based animated character in a previous life in Japan. It gave them a nice steady but not an exorbitant amount of royalty income.
One year, one of the posh international hotels whom we'd licensed to sell some of their merchandise in the gift shop got the bright idea that playing some of the theme music from the film at the hotel lounge would entice their guests into buying some of the merchandise. It actually did and the sales had a noticeable bump during the week or so they ran the promotion.
Unfortunately, one of their agents happened to be present at one such lounge session and presented us with a bill demanding payment of royalties for the "performance." It was for a few hundred dollars given the limited nature of what we really didn't consider a performance but a promotional initiative of our licensee whose work had translated into far more sales in merchandise.
Nevertheless, they wouldn't accept our reasoning and pressed for payment of what amounted to a lot less than the cost of their trip to Japan.
We told them they wouldn't like the result, but they insisted on their pound of flesh. Even though we wrote them the check out of our own funds, the sub-licensee found out about it and pulled their merchandise from the gift shop. This led to several other sub-licensees doing the same. Japan is like a huge small town and word gets around fast.
Their license revenue went from several thousand annually for several consecutive years at the time to exactly zero one year later. With several thousand characters from around the world vying for a spot in Japan's market, nobody wanted to deal with an idiot like this. Of course, we signed off our licensing rights so they could peddle them elsewhere in Japan. But there were no takers.
There is no ACCOUNTING of what songs are being played in the bar therefore there is no distribution to the songwriter.
WB sends goons in to audit the lists periodically but not daily. If you haven’t paid up your protection fee, you will be threatened with lawsuit.
While often this seems petty, one of the issues is to show the patent/trademark office you are interested in protecting your innovations, or they could let your TM expire. My husband knows more about that, but that is the gist of it.
Where is the accounting? Bands put together set lists and don’t run them by the owner of the establishment. There is no history of what was played, just the faulty memories of those in attendance.
CD jukeboxes aren’t paid out to the artists either.
Perhaps with the new internet jukeboxes you see in bars there is such accounting. But the bar owner can’t add a local album to the rotation as he once did.
Royalty structure for live performance of cover tunes differs from your assessment. A single iTunes purchase allows up to 5 individuals to share it privately at will. That is all.
The royalties for playing cover tunes publicly are not overly burdensome quantitatively, but they do tax patience when the letter of the law is followed; when the practical end of songwriting for a living plays out. $30,000.00 is excessive, to be sure, but this is because the venue is withholding due royalties.
BMI, ASCAP, et. al try to ascertain the nature and extent of cover tunes playing in various venues and level a fee straight up. Whether the music is publicly played through a juke box, or by a live band, as long as the venue is using the music to attract business, the songwriters have in place a mechanism to be compensated. Without question human nauture is not at its best in this matter, whether it be the proprietors or the enforcers of these fees. There is wrongdoing against the songwriter on both levels, but a few of them, who also have ways to twist arms, make a princely sum through their efforts.
Exactly what I was just trying to post.
Warner Brothers is still litigious over “Happy Birthday To You” which is over 100 years old (the melody is lifted from “Good Morning To You”).
Are you telling me that every place that plays a song has to pay money? That is crazy. Pretty soon they will want money for people who still listen to the radio.
If we learn to sing Happy Birthday in Korean, do we still owe royalties?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltPA8B99TMo
“I think ASCAP used to collect a check from the clubs I worked “
When I was still gigging, we butted heads with ASCAP, and union guys, ala Blues Bros, a few times. They were a-holes! They wanted the bar owner to pay, as he probably should have been doing. But they also demanded that we play no popular music. Gigs in Cleveland were 6 hours long back then. Bar bands were generally considered as “human jukeboxes.” 6 hours of originals, and no pop music? No way!
Are they sure it wasn’t a recording of the lesser known parody song, “Eye Yonly Half Ice for Ewe”?
Not just that, but if you are a mechanic and have the radio on in your shop (even if the customers don’t hear it) you have to pay.
And they have shaken down bars for televisions too, there may be a Burger King commercial with a Motown song or something. Again, no accountability of what MAY have played so none of the collected money actually goes to the artist. It is a shakedown racket.
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. And vice versa. It was one of those up-and-down weeks.
On the debit side, the US Supreme Court decided by a 7-2 majority that it was not going to restrict Congress’s predilection for extending copyright periods way beyond anything envisaged by the constitution.
The decision represents a devastating blow to internet publishers and others who want to make old books, films and other creative works available online. The case was a legal challenge to the 1998 Copyright Extension Act, which extended the period of copyright protection by a further 20 years, largely at the behest of Disney and other movie studios which were aghast at the prospect of their back lists finally escaping into the public domain.
The court’s majority verdict was that the 1998 extension did not represent unconstitutional overreaching by Congress; nor was it a violation of free-speech rights. ‘We are not at liberty to second-guess congressional determinations and policy judgments of this order, however debatable or arguably unwise they may be,’ said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Although Congress has lengthened copyright 11 times in the past 40 years, each extension was for a finite period - and therefore not in violation of the power to authorise copyright for ‘limited times’ bestowed by the constitution on Congress. It means that US legislators - many of whom are in the pockets of Hollywood lobbyists - can continue to deliver to Disney & Co the control they crave. As the New York Times put it, ‘we are seeing the beginning of the end of public domain and the birth of copyright perpetuity’.
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2003/jan/19/newmedia.business
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lol. SO if my whole family listened to the song, we are in violation? lol
Yeah, my brother in-law owned a restaurant with a bar.
They audit how many speakers you have, how many TVs you have and others (Karoke,etc). Then the capacity of the establishment is factored in.
Often, they make their assessment from your website; they rarely travel to the actual location. In the case of my brother-in-law’s place, this has been grossly overestimated (a seating capacity of 40 was estimated as 350-400)
They charge a flat fee, depending on the percentage of the industry that they represent.
The smaller ones aren’t worth paying - they just don’t have the muscle. The biggest one (I forgot the name), which represents well over half of the registered artists, has been very aggressive in its collections.
No. Only if you took it out into a public venue.
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