Music Labels Claim Fees from Hotels and Prisons

Recording industry want to remove Ireland’s copyright exemption in court as sales drop

As CD sales decline dramatically while more people download music over the Web the record labels prove a rather “wicked” inventiveness in trying to make up for their alleged losses. Music companies have found another target to quench their thirst for lawsuits with and their everlasting need to find culprits for their bad business.

This time around the offender is none other than…the government, yeah, the government for giving hotels and prisons an exemption from royalties when they broadcast songs into bedrooms and cells.

Phonographic Performance Ireland (PPI), revenue collectors for the music industry, initiated the High Court proceedings just before Christmas. According to TimesOnline its purpose is to have part of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000 declared in breach of European directives.
It seems that music industry executives want to establish a fee for bedrooms in hotels and it has come up with the suggestion of a weekly fee of €1 per room to cover royalties for music from CDs, TVs and radios.

The music corporations went on claiming that, by exempting hotels from this fee, Ireland is asynchronous with Europe. “We believe the Irish government has erred in putting in an exclusion in the Copyright Act,” Dick Doyle, PPI chairman pointed out. “In nearly every other jurisdiction in Europe, music played in bedrooms has to be licensed.”

The Irish Hotel Federation (IHF) made no comment to this. Hotels as well as nightclubs have been involved in a prolonged legal fight over royalties paid for playing music.