Raven said:
Ah PRS strikes again... Fucking jobsworths!
They have a completely bullshit "law" stating that shops aren't even allowed to put on a radio incase somebody gets to -heaven forbid- listen to some free music.... From a radio station.... Which broadcasts music....FOR FREE!!!
If the record companies had such a big problem with people hearing music for free, they wouldn't bend over backwards paying out millions of pounds to get the latest shitty ndubz single played on radio sh1te every hour.
PRS doesn't even pay the artists that get heard. It just collects a fee to pay it's own staff and record labels with no regard to who was being played and how often etc...
From the way it sounds to me, the situation is a bit less straightforward than it sounds. It seems to me that the effort here is to harass "mom and pops" stores. Bigger chains have little to worry about, but still lose business to smaller, local businesses, and those that are still around are fairly resiliant. Moves like this tend to be indirectly tracked back to the bigger companies for whom such fees are trivial. This is probably why this kind of nickel and dime stuff doesn't make sense when viewed from the perspective of someone profiting off of it directly. The situation is probably that most of the sales come from the large stores and chains to begin with, and those stores are willing to pay money or offer benefits (such as even larger bulk purchuses of product than they normally make) in exchange for the music industry and the PRS engaging in some harassment of their competition.
I say this because while this exact thing has not happened in the USA, companies like WAL*MART and Target have been caught doing equally dubious things, in the mass media it falls under the general catagory of "predatory business practices", where you have to do a lot of digging to find out the specifics in a lot of cases. In many cases what they are doing isn't illegal, even if it's dirty, and in cases where something is illegal they have a tendency to just wind up paying a fine from the petty cash drawer, the damage having been done and well worth the cost in the final equasion. Hence why those chains get such a bad rap. What's more you'll find that a lot of people in our local and state goverments will cooperate with such chains in harassing their own citizens, because these large stores are good for the economy, a Wal*Mart will typically wind up employing a lot of local people, far more than small businesses (which might be owner or family operated exclusively) do. It might not be fair, but in the end when it comes down to the choice between employing 200 or more local people in many cases, and the operation of Billy Bob's local store, which is owned by operated by, and employs only one person: Billy Bob, the choice is pretty obvious. It doesn't hurt if the big businesses also wind up lining your pockets as well. ( an intentionally simplistic example )
I'll also say that I think this is one of the problems that comes from the UK having such strict anti-gun laws. While similar things happen in the US they don't get quite so overt or obnoxious with the copyright laws, because the people just generally won't stand for it. Yes, having a lot of armed citizens around causes a lot of deaths (OMG! Noes!) but at the same time it also means the goverment tends to be fairly careful about what it does which is the point. Not so much because of a threat of any kind of wide-scale revolution, but simply because when push comes to shove it's always some cop that winds up having to walk in there and enforce that law for it to matter at all. Cops do a job that is dangerous by it's nature, but there is an element to "is it worth it" to the equasion with an armed populance. The police do harass people, but not quite as bad as in a lot of other countries, and we also avoid a lot of more obnoxious laws because an American cop always knows that there is a chance the guy he is going to unfairly harass or shake down might decide to pull a gun. Even though the police are armed, this encourages a degree of restraint. This is why you generally don't see the police being used officially as muscle for business purposes. In the UK it's probably not hard to get the general consensus to make these laws, because in the end the police have little to fear if they have to wind up coming in to do something if people push back too hard. In the US on the other hand they have to weigh whether or not it's worth potnetially getting into a gunfight over. It's not just about the risk to the police either, I mean not a whole lot of people are going to like the idea of basically killing someone who resists being shaken down. A lot of cops don't do the job because they want to be thugs, no matter how it may look to citizens at times. What's more politicians look like idiots if they pass laws that wind up failing because the police refuse to enforce them. That does happen which leads to laws being removed, or simply never enforced, leading to a lot of those stupid "there is actually a law for this" discussions, involving obscure laws that few people ever heard of because some politician thought it was a good idea and the police more or less decided that they simply were not going to enforce it. This is what leads to some of the loophole stupidity in our legal system as well, when some lawyer brings up a really obscure piece of law that might not be enforced on the street, but can't be ignored when proven to be valid in a proceeding like a trial or whatever. It's not always bad either, I remember a list back when I was in criminal justice of "stupid laws used to hold criminals" that were pulled out to do things like prevent murderers and drug dealers from walking out, garbage like "the crime of chewing tobacco more than five feet away from a designated spittoon", BS, but enough to hold so they wouldn't walk away and disappeared. Of course the examples I read were intentionally loaded because the people involved were convicted after the fact despite the stupidity. I'm sure there are cases where it wasn't quite like that.
