Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
Originally Posted by Notes Norton
I've been audited twice by BMI, so what I'm doing is strictly legal. What I paid for legal advice was worth it.
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I'm sorry but that makes absolutely no sense to me.
I know little about US copyright-related stuff ... this is a UK-related aside.

A few years back I received a 'phone call from PRS (Performing Rights Society) here in the UK. They were immediately very aggressive, telling me that my company was in breach of performance copyright on multiple counts and demanding that I agree to pay thousands of pounds a year in royalties for the future and in retrospect. The reason for that, as I eventually dragged out of them, was that playing music or a radio in the workplace, whereby other people can hear it, is considered here to be "public performance". I repeated to them five or six times that I was a consultant and that I worked alone ... there was nobody else here to hear anything I might play. They eventually and rather grumpily went away. At no point did they actually ask whether anything was played in the workplace, they just presumed.

They were trying to alarm me into paying for a licence that I did not need.
In a way, it didn't really matter whether or not it made sense, they were just after some money.

I never understood how playing public-broadcast radio in the workplace could count as an additional public performance of that radio broadcast and justify an additional licence.

Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful.
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