Finnish Taxi Drivers To Pay Royalties For Backseat Music
from the you-can't-be-serious dept
By this point, I shouldn't be amazed at the lengths the music industry will go to in order to make sure that any time any piece of music is played anywhere in the world, they make sure that they get paid for it (often from many different sources). The latest is that the music industry has apparently convinced the Supreme Court in Finland that taxi drivers need to pay royalties for the music they play in their cars. That's right. If the cab driver has the radio on, then he or she owes the music industry money for those "public performances". Time to buy some recordings of music in the public domain...
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Boomboxes to be outlawed next...
I remember listening to a restaurant owner once deride the music industry because he was told by one of their twits that the cooks in the back of the restaurant (well away from the patrons,) could not listen to music while at work because the music could be heard by patrons in the restaurant and that meant that the music was being performed for public consumption and thus had to be paid for (nevermind the fact that they were playing a radio, and the music had already *been* paid for.)
I can see it now: "A Letter for Rosen to Police Everywhere...," the letter would read, "Playing boomboxes in public is theft, it would be the same as walking into a store and stealing a CD. Make public laws which prevent this type of theft."
This is getting really unreal.
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