There are, of course, at least two good reasons for not playing your radio music too loudly. First, it can damage your health. I now wear a hearing-aid in one ear as a result of an accidental close encounter with a very loud loudspeaker in my youth. Secondly, it tends to annoy the neighbours - especially after they have put the children to bed, or when they are trying to concentrate on the process of creating the next novel to rival Harry Potter.
It emerged over the weekend that there is now a third reason for not playing your radio too loudly. You might get prosecuted - not for causing a disturbance, but for playing a performance in public and thereby infringing the copyright of the artists concerned.
The Performing Rights Society (which collects royalties for songwriters and performers) recently gained permission to proceed with a prosecution against Kwik-Fit, whose mechanics, it maintained, routinely use personal radios while working at service centres. This music, protected by copyright, could be heard by colleagues and customers. At a procedural hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh, a judge refused to dismiss the Ł200,000 damages claim.
As a writer and photographer who occasionally sells a picture or gets a royalty cheque, I am all in favour of protecting the rights of creative people. However, the issue here is really whether playing a personal radio at work constitutes broadcasting.
It is easy to see how, in a noisy repair bay, it is necessary to have the radio turned up loudly if the mechanic is going to hear anything meaningful at all. Consequently, customers and other mechanics are likely to catch the occasional tune. I am certainly not a lawyer, but perhaps the issue of intentionality is important. Other mechanics and customers hearing something could be classed as ’accidental spillage’. And the Kwik-Fit management have not made listening to personal radios compulsory, nor have they set up systems for piping the music to staff and customers.
If the unlicensed accidental spillage of sound becomes a crime, you had better shut your windows and turn your radios down. You wouldn’t want a passer-by to hear your set, especially if they happened to be from the Performing Rights Society. My window cleaner, who opens his van door and blasts the street while he cheerily waters the panes, would be forced into miserable silence (and I would have no warning about when his face was about to appear on the other side of the glass).
I also have it on good authority that the tradesmen who work in at least one of the workshops on one UK Royal Estate have their radios on all day as they hammer and chisel and solder for her majesty. If noise spillage becomes a crime, perhaps even HRH could end up in the Tower.
There is always a risk that action to protect one’s rights will be pursued so ruthlessly that it becomes ridiculous zealotry. From your account, I would say that the Performing Rights Society has stepped well over that line.
I hope the judge has allowed to claim to proceed in order to slap them down all the harder: hitting them with the costs of the action would be a good start.
I’m all for limiting noise pollution and think firm action should be taken against neighbours, shops and workers who play their stereos etc loud enough to annoy and inconvenience others but there are appropriate and inappropriate ways to proceed in this. Action by the PRS might have the side effect of quietening down the neighbourhood but it is the wrong way to do it.
I always thought that profit was at the heart of performing rights cases: public performance, the pirating of discs,etc. make money for the illicit operators, not for the owners of the copyright who thus wish to seek redress. The use of radios in the workplace neither makes money for the owners of the radios nor does it deter others from buying the disc. On what basis then does the PRS build its claim?
While I deplore theft and copyright piracy I also deplore enforcement activity that that smacks of the jackboot rather than of reasonable protection of one’s rights.
I sincerely hope the PRS loses this case.