The said wrongful acts of the Defendants have caused and are causing great injury to the Plaintiffs...
I’d like to cause ‘great injury’ to the plaintiffs.
It’s just another protection racket. The money collected NEVER goes to the artist/songwriter. It’s just a fee to prevent being sued.
This would be in the public domain if Mickey Mouse hadn’t bought enough politicians to get copyright extended.
I think ASCAP used to collect a check from the clubs I worked in Manhattan back when I was young and stupid.
Seems a nationwide boycott of Warner Bros.,
by those who support the bar,
might balance the scale.
And they wonder why the music industry is dying.
I would say that actual damages can be calculated. $1 per song for a year (cost to buy a song at iTunes store), so prorated over the number of days the bar is open, times the number of people at the bar on the day in question.
So 1.00 / 312 (assumes open 6 days a week)
times 1 day
times the number of patrons (lets assume 20)
works out to about 6 and a half cents.
Heck, lets be generous and award them $1 just to cover any other possible infractions or errors in assumptions.
The Horror...
It seems to me they are cracking down harder against the targets they can go after, because they are so many other infringers they have no chance of stopping. It’s a losing battle for them, but they can’t give up because that would mean finding an entirely different business model.
Sooner or later though, I expect intellectual property laws to face a severe overhaul, as technology has rendered enforcement of them rather impossible.
Even our church has fill out an online form of songs sung during services and royalties paid (the exception, of course being old hymns in the public domain).
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.
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.
Are they sure it wasn’t a recording of the lesser known parody song, “Eye Yonly Half Ice for Ewe”?
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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I liked Art Garfunkle’s version of that song. Too bad they have no better way of making money these days.
I like that song. It wasn’t that old when I first heard it.
I thought ASCAP and BMI was whom people paid to play such songs.