[geeks] Legal Corporate Music Servers

[Lionel Peterson]

Honestly, I think the best approach is to plead ignorance, do what you
want, and never, NEVER ask about RIAA licensing on a company email
server - maintain plausable deniability. Don't prove you knew it was
illegal.

There is likely no legal way to do what you want (I suspect if
pressed, the RIAA would find fault with a family server sharing music
files among family members).

Lionel

On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 10:34 PM, Phil Stracchino <alaric at metrocast.net>
wrote:
> Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> On May 26, 2009, at 4:37 PM, Patrick Giagnocavo <patrick at zill.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Rick Hamell wrote:
>>>> Does any one on the list work for a company that does, or
>>>> implemented a
>>>> corporate level music server that was legal in the eyes of the RIAA
>>>> and
>>>> their clients?
>>>
>>> I think what you could get away with, would be a license for your
>>> "cafeteria" that follows the pricing of the ASCAP model.  That is,
>>> ignore the part about them each listening to separate music and just
>>> focus on a license for a company cafeteria with x number of seats.
>>
>> You would likely get an a for effort, but would likely still be afoul
>> of the RIAA, and your contributions to the RIAA (license fees) would
>> help fund your prosecution!
>
> Oh, bugger.  I thought I knew someone who's managed this, but I was
> misremembering the details.
>
> Here's the short and dirty.  About 1998, we tried to do this at Cygnus,
> but the minimum license that could be negotiated at the time was for 10K
> listeners for one year for about $5,000, which clearly wasn't on.
>
> About 2005, we (a different we involving many of the same people) tried
> to do the same thing at another company.  The good news was, we were
> able to talk ASCAP down to a $100/year license for up to 50 people.  The
> bad news is, the terms of the license granted ASCAP the right to look at
> ANY AND ALL digital data in the company at any time.  Our legal counsel
> said "Dream on", amended the license to something feasibly acceptable to
> an intellectual-property-based technology company, and sent it back to
> ASCAP for their approval.  ASCAP said, "License terms are
> non-negotiable, take it or leave it."  We left it.
>
>
> (Well, actually, she didn't say "Dream on", she demanded to know what
> kinda *&%$*!#% they were smoking.  But you get the idea.)
>
>
> --
>  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
>  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
>         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
>                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.
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--
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com