Tag: music licensing

This year’s two-year Congressional House Judiciary Committee’s review of copyright “focused on music licensing, discussing recently introduced legislation that has the backing of the music industry. One proposal, the Fair Play, Fair Pay Act, would establish a performance right and also require all radio formats to pay royalties for the performance of pre-1972 recordings.”

These changes to copyright are, for obvious reasons, supported by the musicians and recording artists. Royalties for playing their pre-1972 songs on the radio, in all radio formats no less, are a really good thing for them in that the royalties add additional income to the songwriter’s purse, enabling them to have at least a larger subsistence. It might even enable some of them to leave their day jobs to write music full time, which would add bounty to the music of the culture for which they write.

But wait. Let’s look at the radio stations for a minute. Radio is still a viable medium, but the radio industry has changed from the FCC-recognized model of the station and the broadcast tower and the receiver to the internet. There are literally thousands of shows run by people who want to do a radio show for whatever reason; some of those shows are talk shows, and some are music shows, and some are just junk. I worry about the music shows that play the oldies under this new law. These folks do not, as a general rule, follow the intricacies of the changes to copyright law, and, without proper publication and warning about this new royalty requirement, they could be caught in a vise from which they do not have the means to escape. I can see coming down the pike a reenactment of the RIAA vs. Music Downloaders huge number of cases of the early 2000s. That didn’t work well then; I see no reason why it would work better today.

Don’t get me wrong. I support this addition to the Copyright Act. I want to see songwriters get paid fairly for their contributions to the world, and I think that pre-1972 music should be compensated just as much as post-1972 music. However, I support the addition with the proviso that the public be thoroughly and completely noticed using communication means that they simply cannot miss getting something through even the foggiest radar about this new law. I want to see and hear discussion of this new copyright provision on the news, in the newspapers, on the radio, on PSAs, and all over Facebook and Twitter, and I want to see multiple iterations of the warnings that this new law can, and probably will, cause liability for a careless radio show host for a large bundle of preventable judgment money and attorneys’ costs. This new liability will be in effect even for a fly-by-night internet radio show host. These are the folks who stand to lose the most and who therefore need to see the warning of the effect of this new addendum to the Copyright Act.