OT performing rights society

It just shows what a load of cobblers it is - if half a dozen people can hear a radio in a garage, they must pay for a license, but if the same half a dozen people are all listening to the same broadcast on separate radios with earphones that's okay ... for god sake it's a radio broadcast that anyone can freely listen to, does it really matter who's radio they listen on?

SteveW

Reply to
Steve Walker
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Bruce coughed up some electrons that declared:

Sorry, that is bollocks.

We are not talking about re-producing a song as part of a concert with hundreds of fee paying punters. We are considering a situation where someone, who happens to be at work, is playing the radio for their own benefit and possibly for a few colleagues.

Anyone overhearing, including those colleagues could easily have their own personal radios tuned to the same station - it would make no difference to the economics.

As I said - the whole thing is a scam, and a twisted scam at that. Everyone managed quite happily for the last several decades - why do things differently now?

Reply to
Tim S

Or they have damn good accountants and offshore accounts ...

Owain

Reply to
Owain

I think PRS investigators are now paid by results. So if you think of a combination of double-glazing salesman and TV Licencing you get the picture

Owain

Reply to
Owain

OK, you can have the last word: "Bollocks", I think it was.

Reply to
Bruce

But it *isn't* a radio broadcast that anyone can freely listen to !!

That's the whole point.

Reply to
Bruce

Thing is, I'm imagining a situation where each employee in a workshop has their own walkman/radio/ipod with headphones/equivalent. That's legal according to PRS, even if they're all listening to the same radio station. Yet replace that with a single radio with a loudspeaker, and it suddenly becomes a chargeable event.

Broadly speaking, I feel that once something is broadcast free-to-air, it should be available to anybody at that time. So eg recording the radio and selling on or rebroadcasting later in public may well be out - but listening at the time should be open to all. And yes, that does mean a nightclub using a radio station as soundtrack would be reasonable - how the radio station is charged for that is the PRS's problem.

TV licence fees cover the provision of TV apparatus. I do wonder about use in eg a pub - the majority of visitors will already have a TV licence, so asking the pub to pay extra for a special commercial licence seems potentially unreasonable. (Stuff like sky is a separate issue - that's their problem)

Now whether or not the law agrees with me is a different question - but if it doesn't, I reckon it's wrong.

Nice non-sequitur there. How about not resorting to irrelevant examples?

Reply to
Clive George

Yes, that's correct. You have gone from personal use, which is funded via the TV licence fee, to re-broadcasting, which needs a paid-for licence from PRS.

Open and shut case, M'Lud.

Earlier in the thread, someone asked if the money raised by PRS actually went back to the artists and copyright holders. Indeed it does; the PRS has for many years employed a network of people who listen to the radio and TV (while doing other things) and note down which songs are played and who sang them. Different rates are payable depending on how much of the song is played - for example an advert that samples a song doesn't pay anywhere near the full whack.

Reply to
Bruce

PRS are "not for profit", but as many have found when dealing with such businesses that doesn't mean they are charities or that they don't pay their staff, especially senior ones, most handsomely. Is anyone aware of what proportion of the fees they collect goes to the performers and what goes into their own pockets?

Of that proportion which goes to performers I wonder how much goes to those performers earning less than say £1M per year before PRS paid to them? I suspect it is a trivial amount and that the major purpose of the PRS is to keep snouts firmly in troughs.

Reply to
Peter Parry

Surely the whole point is that it *is* a radio broadcast that anyone can freely listen but for the purposes of milking some money from people, we're constructing a legal pretence that it's not.

Reply to
mike

The PRS was formed in 1914. I suspect that the dramatic drop in record sales in recent years means that performers depend more on revenue from PRS licences than they used to, resulting in more active enforcement of the law.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
nightjar

You can suspect all you like, but musicians I know are very fond of the PRS and have great respect for the work it does. The principle is that musicians should not be expected to perform for free, nor should composers be expected to have their works performed for free.

There has to be a mechanism for extracting due payment and passing it on to the performers and copyright holders. It is always going to be complicated. Overall, the PRS does a pretty good job, but it cannot ever be perfect. I somehow doubt that the financial rewards for being one of the more senior people at the PRS are anywhere near justifying the term "snouts in troughs".

I wish, for the sake of musicians and composers, that there was an equally good way to ensure that proper royalties were paid when music is sold or copied. It is all too often done free of charge and therefore illegally, and musicians and composers are being denied the proper reward for their efforts to entertain. It was bad enough in the days of vinyl records being copied onto cassette tapes, but the advent of MP3 files means that illegal copying is now rife.

I suspect that all the people spouting here about the "injustice" of being asked to pay a nominal sum for a re-broadcast licence would be outraged at being asked to work for nothing. But that's effectively what they are expecting musicians and composers to do.

These people entertain us and they deserve their rewards just as much as anyone else.

Reply to
Bruce

I have already pointed out that radio broadcasts for individual use are paid for via the TV licence and, in the case of commercial radio, by advertising.

Perhaps your selective dyslexia led you to overlook that point.

Or, more likely, you are just another chancer who wants something for nothing.

Reply to
Bruce

Um, that's not true. See the example given to you twice yet dismssed for no apparent reason - the difference between 10 people listing to radio 2 on their walkmen vs the same 10 listening to it on a radio with loudspeakers. Both situations involve the same number of people hearing the same song/performance at the same time, yet somehow you feel that one justifies an extra payment.

The radio station has made that performance available to everybody with access to a radio, and they've made an payment for that. If the calculation made for that payment is wrong because the estimated number of people is wrong, then fix that, rather than hounding people for a badly-worded law.

Reply to
Clive George

I presume they use the audited audience figures.

Colin Bignell

Reply to
nightjar

nightjar

That drop came after the bonuses of format changes and delicate media over many years. We probably all know of people who replaced vinyl due to scratches, maybe got cassettes, and then CDs - all of the same performances. (I know I have several CDs which replaced vinyl I had already bought.)

Thus the thin years came after the fat. And were all the more obvious because of the fat years.

Reply to
Rod

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:16:57 +0000 someone who may be Bruce wrote this:-

Re-broadcasting would involve setting up a radio transmitter to transmit the signals to radios in the workplace, so that line is void.

Reply to
David Hansen

On Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:27:09 +0000 someone who may be Bruce wrote this:-

At the time the doom-sayers said that home taping was killing music. If that had been true then music would be dead by now.

I was once given an "illegal" collection of tracks by an artist I had just found out about. The upshot of that was that I bought two CDs and I'll probably buy more. The artist has a little money they would not otherwise have had.

All this "copyright protection" crap has done for me is to stop me purchasing music. When they remove it, as some shops have done, I'll consider spending my money again.

Reply to
David Hansen

I'm sure they do, it must be very profitable for "musicians" struggling in cold garrets like Mrs Beckham.

No one seems to have a problem with that concept.

So to ask the question again -:-

How much of each pound collected goes to running the PRS? Of the remainder how much goes to already wealthy established performers and how much to the majority at the bottom of the pile?

Does anyone know?

Reply to
Peter Parry

So what about the 'transmissions' which are live-streamed to the 'net by the broadcasters themselves ? Those are totally free to listen to by anyone, world wide, whether they have a UK broadcast receiving license or not. The likes of the BBC are not realistically going to be able to expect to control any aspect of who or how many people are listening to any of their internet output anywhere, so that has to constitute transmissions "that anyone can freely listen to".

Perhaps the PRS should take that up with the BBC and others, and see if they can persuade them to stop doing it, hmmm ? d;~}

Arfa

Reply to
Arfa Daily

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