[Dallas59]

In the lawsuit Warner Bros. claims to have been severely harmed by the public performance in the Amityville bar, for which it demands proper compensation. Since the actual damage can’t be calculated they ask for up to $30,000 per infringement.

The said wrongful acts of the Defendants have caused and are causing great injury to the Plaintiffs...

[John S Mosby]

Small coffeehouse of 20 seats. Features local writers, poets etc. One of these outfits comes in, counts the chairs, and says they owe them annual $2K. Which coffeehouse spends for 1/4 of the year on coffee/supplies alone. They closed. Place no longer in business or a place to support the arts.

Comments on the posting, however range into anarchic— saying that intellectual property rights should be abolished. Very self serving for internet thieves.

Issue here is that WB would not go after google for this type of violation, but instead shake down a small business even as they cannot quantify the “damage” to the publisher, who is long dead and sold out to WB. Slick.

[factoryrat]

Copyright/patent trolls abound. You know when a company is on the decline when the bean counters and lawyers take over, and resort to shaking down people over ancient and often forgotten copyrights. Patents and copyrights weren't meant to go on in perpetuity.

[left that other site]

I don’t have a link...just my own memory of the incident, but I believe at one time ASCAP sued the Girl Scouts for singing “God Bless America”.

That is so ironic, because the Scouts were a favorite charity of Irving Berlin, and he even appeared with them singing that very song in the movie starring Ronald Reagan called “This Is the Army”.

I am a songwriter myself, and belong to BMI, and although I have received airplay and Internet downloads of a number of my songs, BMI has never contacted me in the thirty years of my association with them! Go figure.

[PATRIOT1876]

I’d say that the actual damage to Warner Brothers is about 30 cents in Canadian money.

Pretty bad PR for Warner!

[Gay State Conservative]

I have a friend who lives in the Boston area,an area in which many of the suburban towns have basically merged their individual library systems into one huge one.As a result,any resident of any of these towns has borrowing access to every item in the entire system.Over times he made exact copies,as one can easily do with Windows and a CD burner) of about 5,000 songs found on various CDs he borrowed.Didn't pay a cent in royalties.Just the cost of the blank CDs,which hold about 20-25 songs each.A huge music collection containing *only* songs he likes and “Hollywood” didn't get a nickel from him.

[nikos1121]

I would think it’s in the public domain