Its ironic, but there is no way that an owner of a place, wether a dental office or a car repair shop can license the performance of songs played on radio or television RATIONALLY:

1. Licenses sold to these places are “blind” (the so called blanket licnse), meaning that the licensee has preactically no idea what songs are in fact licensed.

2. The owners of radios have also no idea IN ADVANCE as to what songs will be broadcast.

3. Even if the radio owner knew in advance what song will be played, it could not check to see if his/her license covered the song so as to turn the radio off when an unlicensed song is being broadcasted.

The above means that the so called blanket licenses are rather useless and cannot solve an alleged problem of music being used for free when radios are heard in public places.

I think some defense lawyers for venues that have been approached or sued by the performance righters have not been smart about this issue, have not used it as a defense and are instead advising their clients to pay for the music, simply because it’s cheaper to cave in than to fight. What a riot.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071008-the-next-copycrime-making-hearable-rings-up-200000-copyright-suit.html

Playing music in one’s business IS NOT A CRIME - especially when it is free music. Since the republicans have so long bitched and moaned about big businesses having to face frivilous lawsuits, they should feel the same about big corporations doing the same thing against people. If big business choose to terrorize people with their high price lawyers, then their executives should be afraid to be in society. I’m going to laugh when they go after the wrong person and that person goes Virginia Tech on them. Unfortunately, in our society, well placed violent acts seem to be the quickest way to spur reform.

This is like entrapment.

What do musicians think of this kind of behaviour? Don’t you think they want people to listen to their music and not have a fear of being sued?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7021743.stm

Many musicians want people to hear their music.

I’ve always wondered, why do the RIAA never go after the mass producers of copyrighted material who end up selling it on the streets? Do they, and you just don’t hear about it? Or are the RIAA afraid that if they do, they might get retaliation from the big, bad “terrorists” who profit from it?

How much of the money the RIAA gets from lawsuits goes to the musicians?

Can you offer proof of this?

I’ll take a link on this thread.

Come on, show us you do it for the artists.