Wow, thanks for your comments. Didn’t know there was any justification for this stuff, but this thread has convinced me otherwise. Still... Has the music industry gone after small operators of day care centers, say? Or after 16-year-old babysitters? Seems like a slippery slope.
>> Has the music industry gone after small operators of day care centers, say? Or after 16-year-old babysitters? <<
I think that in an “ideal” world, anybody who uses copyrighted music to enhance his or her income/profit should pay a royalty fee to the music’s copyright holder.
But the world is never ideal. So the enforcement and collection costs of charging 16-year-old babysitters would probably always be so high as to make any such scheme totally impractical. Besides, it would “look really bad” in a political sense. Therefore, it just ain’t gonna happen.
On the other hand, for-profit daycare centers are few enough and identifiable enough that ASCAP and BMI could probably enforce a small fee — say $50.00 per year — for unlimited access to their catalogues.
So if charging daycare centers isn’t forbidden by U. S. copyright law, I say to ASCAP and BMI, “Go for it!”