Garage Sued over Playing a Radio

by Jordan Yerman | October 6, 2007 at 12:59 pm

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I don't know which is sillier: that the Performing Rights Society is claiming that music played in a car repair shop is a "public performance", or that the judge didn't throw this case out the window.

The PRS claimed that Kwik-Fit mechanics routinely use personal radios while working at service centres across the UK and that music, protected by copyright, could be heard by colleagues and customers.

It is maintained that amounts to the "playing" or "performance" of the music in public and renders the firm guilty of infringing copyright.

My posting history (and the fact that I work for a collaborative media site) shows where I stand on this sort of thing. Try as I might, I cannot see how any harm is being done here. Meanwhile, the implications quickly stray into the territory of nonsense:

If you have the windows open in your home and are listening to your legally owned music (or your TV!) and your neighbor can hear it, is that a public performance? What if you live in an apartment building with thin walls? What about when you're driving with the radio on and the windows open? What if you're in your cubicle and the folks in the cubicles around you can hear the music?

What if I sing really, really loudly in the shower and my neighbor hears? Did I just do an illegal performance? If so, Mike Ness, Mick Jagger, Tom Waits, Sly Stone, and the late Curtis Mayfield are going to be really angry with me...