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A roller-skating epiphany
Last weekend, I had what can be only described as a roller-skating epiphany about the legality of file sharing. It all started when my girlfriend decided she wanted to have an old-fashioned roller-skating birthday party, the kind you might remember attending in early adolescence. Aside from the vans we rented to get everyone out of the city, Redwood City Roller Rink provided everything we needed: the skates, the rink, a snack bar, disco lights, and a sound system. But we needed to make sure our old-school venue had the right music. After all, everyone was going to be decked out in '70s and '80s disco garb, and we didn't want to spoil the nostalgic mood with histrionic warbling from the likes of Misses Spears and Aguilera.
The solution? We asked everyone to e-mail me their musical requests and ended up bringing our own CDs and tipping the DJ to play them. But while I was skating around, I realized I could've used file-sharing programs to meet all the requests. Using Audiogalaxy for the rare stuff and KaZaa for the popular stuff blocked by Audiogalaxy, it would have been easy to search for every song, queue them up for downloading, and watch them appear in my download folder. After firing up my CD burner and cranking out a few CDs worth of primo roller-skating audio, I could have given the CD-Rs to the DJ, and voilà--our own personalized soundtrack would start booming over the sound system.
Breaking the law?
So despite having downloaded copyrighted songs, burned them onto CD, and played them over a massive sound system, would I have broken the law? Public venues such as roller rinks, bars, and restaurants pay annual fees to performing-rights organizations BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC, which in turn dole out the money to the various rights holders. The CDs I would've burned would have never been played outside of the roller rink, which had already taken care of its performance rights.
Let's assume for argument's sake that I brought 50 downloaded tracks on three CD-Rs, ranging from Rose Royce's "Car Wash" to Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." If I could even find all of those songs at a store, it would have cost me $749.50 to duplicate the mix (assuming that each CD cost $14.99 and that I couldn't find compilation albums with more than one requested song on them). Instead, I'd have spent about $2 for three CD-Rs. The price of creating the compilation would be even more retro than the clothes we wore.
Now, in the initial act of downloading the songs from other people's hard drives, I would technically have been infringing on the exclusive right of the copyright holders to make reproductions of their songs. But since no case has come to court accusing an individual of this sort of infringement, I'd have felt relatively OK about it. And as for the public performance of those CDs, I'd be in the clear, assuming Redwood City Roller Rink had paid its dues to performing-rights organizations.
This legal loophole could enable more than just a (admittedly excellent) roller-skating party. To see why, let me rewind a couple years back in the Napster case. Napster's main defense was based on a precedent set by the Sony v. Universal decision in 1984, which held that the potentially copyright-infringing Betamax machine was legal because it had substantial noninfringing uses. Now I'm no lawyer, but that public performance sure felt like a substantial, noninfringing use. It got me thinking about how many of us have created mixes for events in the same way--it stands only to reason because it's the quickest and cheapest way to assemble a mix.
Too legit to quit
Just to make sure, I called Hanna Bolte, senior director of media relations for BMI, and asked her to confirm my suspicion that I would not have broken the law in terms of the public performance of these songs. She said that BMI has "a general-licensing area that covers restaurants, bars, clubs, roller rinks, football stadiums, and other establishments that aren't necessarily a broadcasting medium, but they are publicly performing music and fall within the area that we license and the repertoire that we represent." She went on to tell me that any time someone throws a private party in a BMI-licensed venue, they can play their own mix of music over the sound system without any legal worries from the organization. She called the general-licensing department and had them check if the Redwood City Roller Rink folks were paid up on their fees. Sure enough, they were, and I assume that if they paid BMI, they also paid ASCAP and SESAC. It was true--I would've been able to play a downloaded roller-skating compilation in a public venue, fearing legal reprisals from only the labels about the initial private downloading, something that has yet to be prosecuted anyway.
So the next time you or a friend rents out a public place for a party, know that it's perfectly legal to blast out whatever tunes you want on the sound system. Playing a compilation of downloaded music in public is legal--just don't tell anyone how you made it. Even if you do, there's no legal precedent for the labels to hassle you. You heard it here first, from your friendly neighborhood, roller-skating MP3 Insider.
Last weekend, I had what can be only described as a roller-skating epiphany about the legality of file sharing. It all started when my girlfriend decided she wanted to have an old-fashioned roller-skating birthday party, the kind you might remember attending in early adolescence. Aside from the vans we rented to get everyone out of the city, Redwood City Roller Rink provided everything we needed: the skates, the rink, a snack bar, disco lights, and a sound system. But we needed to make sure our old-school venue had the right music. After all, everyone was going to be decked out in '70s and '80s disco garb, and we didn't want to spoil the nostalgic mood with histrionic warbling from the likes of Misses Spears and Aguilera.
 Click to enlarge |
Breaking the law?
So despite having downloaded copyrighted songs, burned them onto CD, and played them over a massive sound system, would I have broken the law? Public venues such as roller rinks, bars, and restaurants pay annual fees to performing-rights organizations BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC, which in turn dole out the money to the various rights holders. The CDs I would've burned would have never been played outside of the roller rink, which had already taken care of its performance rights.
Let's assume for argument's sake that I brought 50 downloaded tracks on three CD-Rs, ranging from Rose Royce's "Car Wash" to Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger." If I could even find all of those songs at a store, it would have cost me $749.50 to duplicate the mix (assuming that each CD cost $14.99 and that I couldn't find compilation albums with more than one requested song on them). Instead, I'd have spent about $2 for three CD-Rs. The price of creating the compilation would be even more retro than the clothes we wore.
Now, in the initial act of downloading the songs from other people's hard drives, I would technically have been infringing on the exclusive right of the copyright holders to make reproductions of their songs. But since no case has come to court accusing an individual of this sort of infringement, I'd have felt relatively OK about it. And as for the public performance of those CDs, I'd be in the clear, assuming Redwood City Roller Rink had paid its dues to performing-rights organizations.
| I had what can be only described as a roller-skating epiphany. |
This legal loophole could enable more than just a (admittedly excellent) roller-skating party. To see why, let me rewind a couple years back in the Napster case. Napster's main defense was based on a precedent set by the Sony v. Universal decision in 1984, which held that the potentially copyright-infringing Betamax machine was legal because it had substantial noninfringing uses. Now I'm no lawyer, but that public performance sure felt like a substantial, noninfringing use. It got me thinking about how many of us have created mixes for events in the same way--it stands only to reason because it's the quickest and cheapest way to assemble a mix.
Too legit to quit
 Click to enlarge |
So the next time you or a friend rents out a public place for a party, know that it's perfectly legal to blast out whatever tunes you want on the sound system. Playing a compilation of downloaded music in public is legal--just don't tell anyone how you made it. Even if you do, there's no legal precedent for the labels to hassle you. You heard it here first, from your friendly neighborhood, roller-skating MP3 Insider.
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| MP3 Nugget: Try the hot, new file-sharing client First came Napster, then Scour, Morpheus, LimeWire, and the rest. The latest P2P client of note is a peculiarly named little program called Qtraxmax. Unlike Audiogalaxy or KaZaa, Qtraxmax connects to the Gnutella network, which is completely decentralized and, therefore very, very difficult to sue or close down. LimeWire, BearShare, and now Morpheus also connect to the Gnutella network but none so elegantly as Qtraxmax, according to numerous new converts. In my testing, it has performed quite admirably. Get with the program and download this new kid on the block. From what we can tell, you won't be disappointed. | ||
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Download Qtraxmax
