[advocacy] Ogg for commercial purpose ?

[Daniel James]

> I heard a long time back that if you find a MP3 song somewhere on the net
> and download it, then you can listen it for personal use but cannot use it
> for commercial use.

That depends on where you downloaded the MP3 from. If you downloaded it from
the bands' own site, then that implies that at least personal use is
approved. Unfortunately, sites rarely make explicit the terms under which the
songs are made available, leaving you in a legal grey area.

If you download it for free from a third party, who has ripped the song from a
CD without artist consent, then it is almost certainly not approved for
either personal or commercial use. In practice, royalty collection societies
do not currently collect money directly from end users because the amount
owed for the use of an individual track is probably less than the cost of
collection. Instead they target the larger commercial users - radio stations,
clubs and chain stores.

> For example, a store can't play MP3 songs in the store.

There are server appliances designed for exactly this task, intended to have
greater reliability as they don't have the moving parts of the traditional
tape and CD autochanger systems. They can also store more music given
sufficient hard disk space. But the payment of artist royalties is still
required if you play the music in public.

When I worked in a chain store shop, we were told that we could play music on
FM radio (with the performance royalty already paid by the radio station) but
not from CD's or tapes. I think Head Office must have had a visit from the
MCPS, which is the royalty collection society for recordings in the UK.

Cheers

Daniel
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