Copyright Advisory Network

From across the Atlantic Ocean comes a real forehead slapper: A woman who plays classical music to her horses has been told she must pay a £99 a year license fee for public performances.

The Performing Rights Society – the British version of ASCAP or BMI – claims that the license is required because of the humans who work at the stables, and that they’re not arguing that playing music to animals constitutes a public performance. Of course, the irony is that most of the humans at the stables don’t like the music, and would choose not to listen to it given the option.

From the Telegraph article:

“The staff are not bothered whether they have the radio on or not, in fact they don’t particularly like my music and turn if off when I’m not around.”

Mrs Greenway, who keeps 11 horses at the stables, added: “You would have thought that playing music to your own horses was allowable but apparently not.

“Especially on windy days I try to play it – it gives them a nice quiet atmosphere, you can only exercise one horse at a time so it helps the others to stay calm.

“We are right next to the RAF Lyneham air base so it dulls the noise from the aircraft as well.”

This is a perfect example of Big Content’s push to make every use a paid use. The “if we can charge for it, we should charge for it” mentality is not new, but it seems to be getting more aggressive all the time. Stories like this are an affront not just to fair use but to common sense. Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, but only if you fork over a yearly licensing fee? Really? Smells like horse dung to me.

MollyKleinman Copyright news Hall of Shame

[March 25: Factual updates via TechDirt]

It’s common knowledge that for years the content industry and other threatened rightsholders have been appropriating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in order to bully competitors or the fair-use-toting public into removing content from the Internet. Google has now released some statistics that show just how widespread these tactics have been.

In a submission to the Telecommunications Carriers Forum concerning proposed updates to New Zealand’s copyright law, Google noted that “more than half (57%) of the takedown notices it has received…were sent by business targeting competitors and over one third (37%) of notices were not valid copyright claims.”

The data suggest that businesses have been misusing the DMCA in order to squash competition and chill legitimate speech. The provisions of the DMCA that were originally intended to protect ISPs and other distributors of content from liability continue to be improperly wielded by an overzealous industry trying to make others play the game by their rules. While some recent rulings provide a glimmer of hope in reforming the broken DMCA takedown system, the public interest will have to continue the copyright fight for their rights.

Timothy Vollmer Copyright news copyright, copyrightfail, DMCA, Hall of Shame