pay per performance

While I was thanking God that the Patriot Act didn't get passed by the Senate, I heard about what those in the EU have to go through: full recording of every phone/digital transmission by every person in the EU. The Patriot Act doesn't just permit this kind of "governmental oversight", but strengthens the power of a copyright owner to prosecute others for supposed violations of fair use. Anyway, one society in Britain, the Performing Rights Society, is trying to flex its muscle for supposed violations of copyright as well. One music shop owner is told that he must pay a license fee for anyone to try out a copyrighted tune before buying an instrument (a commonplace thing at the Guitar Center here in the US) because it counts as a "public performance". Seriously, that's a whole lot of crapola.

[update: now Britain is taking it a step further and tracking all vehicle movement...hopefully that's not happening already in the US without our knowledge. I know they do it at the Mexico-US border, but that's not half as bad as what's now going to happen in Britain.]

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