Italian Pirate Bay Block Leads To Massive Traffic Boost For Competing Torrent Sites

UK Court Shoots Down Fee Hike For Pubs, Restaurants & Hotels

from the give-the-money-back dept

Wed, Feb 17th 2010 2:30am — Mike Masnick

Over the last few years, we've seen collections societies around the world do whatever possible to bring in more money -- most often by either trying to hike up their fees and by trying to collect from more places/venues -- even when those claims are often quite a stretch. Luis Esteves alerts us to the news that, over in the UK, one of the local collections societies, PPL, has lost a lawsuit concerning its fee hike back in 2005 -- meaning that pubs, restaurants and hotels that play music in the UK may be getting somewhere around £20m in revenue back from PPL. While this is one small victory against the rapid expansion of these groups, it's still worth noting that these groups, often with the backing of the government, are almost always rent seeking -- looking for more ways to get money out of organizations and individuals.

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Filed Under: collection society, copyright, hotsl, pubs, restaurants, uk
Companies: ppl

11 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 17 Feb 2010 @ 4:15am

Some good news are welcome every once in a while.
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ethorad (profile), 17 Feb 2010 @ 4:40am

how will PPL pay?
I'm wondering how PPL will pay the £20m. After all, it's not like they have many assets since they'll have been distributing it all to artists over the years.

Right?
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Call me Al, 17 Feb 2010 @ 4:58am

Re: how will PPL pay?
hehe very true.

Chances are they can pay it out of the small change they find lying around their offices... that being the money for the non-major artists that they are waiting to distribute to the artists.
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Feb 2010 @ 5:03am

Re: Re: how will PPL pay?
Utter nonsense! Collection societies are the BEST thing that ever happened to artists, and to music in general.

(/s)
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Ima Fish (profile), 17 Feb 2010 @ 5:29am

"...are almost always rent seeking..."

When you seek payment via force and coercion the technical term is extortion.
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Killer_Tofu (profile), 17 Feb 2010 @ 5:35am

Re:
My bubbles.
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Crazy Old Man, 17 Feb 2010 @ 5:59am

Crazy IDea...
If I were a pub or restaraunt, I'd approach local bands and tell them that I will play their music for free.

If the don't want to play ball, there are other local bands that will.

Heck, I'll even offer to sell their CDs too.

Free advertising for them, free music for me.

Screw RIAA and it's illegitimate spawn!
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Rasmus, 17 Feb 2010 @ 6:16am

Re: Re: Re: how will PPL pay?
Collections societies would be illegal if it wasn't for a very dubious exception to laws against anti-competitive practices created by the Bern convention.
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Hephaestus (profile), 17 Feb 2010 @ 6:55am

Re: Crazy IDea...
Actually this is already happening in Australia. Where bar and club owners are getting together and finding CC and free music. If this were to happen around the world the labels would probably try to get laws passed to stop it. They were extremely fearful of a single 100 watt high school radio station boycotting artists supporting the Performance Rights tax. The station stopped playing music of these artists for a month.
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Anonymous Coward, 17 Feb 2010 @ 7:52am

"it's still worth noting that these groups, often with the backing of the government, are almost always rent seeking -- looking for more ways to get money out of organizations and individuals."

they're lazy failures that go around extorting hard workers for no good reason and the government backs them only because they're also lazy failures and get paid campaign contributions by extortionist lazy failures.
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Some Other Guy, 17 Feb 2010 @ 8:43am

Re: Re: Re: how will PPL pay?
Have you paid for the use of that sarcasm mark? :)
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