It is mainly the songwriters who are harmed. This is the only way songwriters make money. And you are mistaken that radio stations don’t pay royalties. They don’t pay the artist for the recording, but they pay a few cents for the song copyright (usually via BMA or ASCAP). How do singer/songwriters like Taylor Swift make so much money? They may not make a ton from performances, but they also get paid for the songs.
MOH has to pay for both the copyright and the performance, unless the song is in the public domain. >From my perspective, I worry when I own the PBX that is hosting the customer’s >MOH. I don’t want to pay a lawyer to defend against a copyright lawsuit. I >want the customer to show me they have a license for their MOH before I’ll >load it on the PBX. I’m not going to police what they do on their own >equipment, but don’t make me complicit in your unlawful activities. As far as radio stations, they will get caught for not paying royalties. You know the equipment that shows like Daily Show use to scan through recordings of past TV shows for stuff politicians or Fox News said? Kind of like a DVR plus Google search? I believe that technology was originally developed to police paying of copyright royalties. From: Adam Moffett Sent: Friday, October 02, 2015 11:15 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] New hold music for the customer facing asterisk IVR How am I harmed if someone is creating and selling stinger antennas without license. That's a different animal. Presumably you lose a sale for every sale of the counterfeit unit. Unauthorized public performances might raise awareness of an artist's work and conceivable increase sales. A radio station doesn't need license to play music on the air. The artists and recording companies recognize that being on the radio makes them more popular and thus helps them sell tickets and/or recordings. In theory, being on some Company's hold music should have the same effect. Mind you....I do my best to follow the law. I even come to a complete stop at stop signs. I encourage customers to follow the law as well, especially when I'm speaking as an agent of my employer. I'm just pointing out that sometimes following the law feels silly. On 10/2/2015 12:07 PM, [email protected] wrote: I guess they are not harmed if they don’t know they were harmed. But that is a practical tangible physical answer. The theoretical answer is someone copying the intellectual property is a “market replacement” and they have suffered financial harm, they were damaged. If they did not have access to the music (like we do now) other than going to the record store and buying the 45 RPM record they would not be able to get it. In those days the control of the property was pretty easy. Moreover, MOH is an offshoot of a public performance. Mazak got into hot water along with some of their customers in the early days of these IP wars too. The artist deserves to be compensated for the use of their creation. Just like a patent. How am I harmed if someone is creating and selling stinger antennas without license. From: Adam Moffett Sent: Friday, October 2, 2015 9:41 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] New hold music for the customer facing asterisk IVR I had the same issue with some PBX customers. I found a website full of public domain music and suggested they pick from it. One customer was a church that recorded their own pianist playing some of those 18th century hymns that nobody owns anymore. At the end of the day, if the customer told me to set up their Bob Marley CD as their hold music, then I did what they asked. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't stop him from peeing in it.....or something like that. ....in theory, how is an artist is damaged by MOH? On 10/2/2015 11:19 AM, Ken Hohhof wrote: One of the struggles I have with hosted PBX customers is getting them to understand that MOH needs (in most cases) to be licensed. The cost per track or for a subscription is usually pretty small, but the idea of shelling out any money at all seems to be a showstopper. (Of course, their time and yours is free.) Seriously, the owner of the business is spending time obsessing over it, but spending something like $129 for an unlimited subscription to a catalog of on hold music is too much money to do it legally? My question is, if customers are spending so much time on hold they get sick of the stock Asterisk MOH, maybe you should do something about your hold times? Or record your own content, like if you have radio commercials. But really, the purpose of MOH is to be non-intrusive while telling the caller they have not been disconnected. Not to compete with Pandora and Spotify. Sorry, I realize this wasn’t really on topic. From: [email protected] Sent: Friday, October 02, 2015 9:47 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [AFMUG] New hold music for the customer facing asterisk IVR Ha! From: Eric Kuhnke Sent: Thursday, October 1, 2015 6:06 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [AFMUG] New hold music for the customer facing asterisk IVR (For anyone who thinks the path looks weird, this is the / of my voip server temporarily mounted as ~/voipserver/ via sshfs) Image attached
