"Bruce" wrote in message
...

and commercial radio is
paid for by adverts - more listeners = more people listening to ads???


Yes, commercial radio is paid for by advertising. BBC Radio is paid for
out of the TV Licence fee*. That covers private and personal use, but
for re-broadcasting copyright music to others, yes, you have to pay.

Thing is, I'm imagining a situation where each employee in a workshop has
their own walkman/radio/ipod with headphones/equivalent. That's legal
according to PRS, even if they're all listening to the same radio station.
Yet replace that with a single radio with a loudspeaker, and it suddenly
becomes a chargeable event.

Broadly speaking, I feel that once something is broadcast free-to-air, it
should be available to anybody at that time. So eg recording the radio and
selling on or rebroadcasting later in public may well be out - but listening
at the time should be open to all. And yes, that does mean a nightclub using
a radio station as soundtrack would be reasonable - how the radio station is
charged for that is the PRS's problem.

TV licence fees cover the provision of TV apparatus. I do wonder about use
in eg a pub - the majority of visitors will already have a TV licence, so
asking the pub to pay extra for a special commercial licence seems
potentially unreasonable. (Stuff like sky is a separate issue - that's their
problem)

Now whether or not the law agrees with me is a different question - but if
it doesn't, I reckon it's wrong.

Presumably you think re-broadcasting copyright music should be free, in
the same way that iTunes and other music download sites are free ...?

Presumably you see nothing wrong in copying MP3 files without payment?

Nice non-sequitur there. How about not resorting to irrelevant examples?