Consumerist is slow in the posting of this news story. I read it on Gizmodo at around 11 a.m.

It's not like those damn things play the entire song. Most people hang up before you let it ring that long. These people were asking to be paid for giving carriers the privilege of advertising for them. Stupid, greedy bastards.

This is what is wrong with the industry. If they spent more time producing music and less time suing people for the performance of a ring-tone they might be in better shape. Thank goodness the judge was able to apply some logic to their argument.

I agree that paying money for Ring-tones is completely dumb. Why is the whole song cost $0.99 but a 30 second clip costs $2.49?

Vote with your dollars! Don't buy ring-tones!

@tackhouse1: Mm-hmm. I make my own. Get a Chinese Sharp phone. Totally worth it.

@jamar0303: I "make my own" too and by make, I mean my HTC smart phone uses MP3s as ring tones...

As I was reading this an image of "It's a Wonderful Life" popped into my head.

"Look, Daddy! Teacher says, every time a ringtone plays, a royalty gets paid!"

I hacked my Motorola to play .mp3s as ringtones. It's MY music, MINE MINE MINE. RIAA, ASCAP can pry it out of my cold dead hands!

If these cheeseheads had their way you would have to pay a royalty everytime you wiped yourself.

I guess someone could make a cell phone play a "song" really loudly in a large public forum, and the "song" could be anything like propoganda. They would then not need any permits, and no one could do anything to stop them. I guess the definition of a phone would have to be pretty tight as well. ie: megaphone ducked tapped to a phone, but considered one item.

@tackhouse1: Has anyone used [www.myxer.com] ? I haven't had a need for it yet so I haven't used it. It seems to be a free way to convert any mp3 to a ring tone and they even send it to your phone.

So is AT&T paying anything to anyone to use the music for the ringtones?

I'm confused.

So, by this logic, if I hear someone driving down the road playing their music loud, i should write down their license plate number and alert ASCAP about a public performance?

@twophrasebark: Most likely yes. They are talking about the PLAYING of a ringtone being a separate performance. That is what the judge struck down today.

@holytrainwreck: There is a toilet paper roller that plays music while it turns. I don't know about royalties but I'll happily share the results of my efforts with ASCAP.

ASCAP also visited my favorite coffee shop and demanded they stop playing music or pay $2000.

@chapoec: but thank god you chimed in with this witty observation in under 20 minutes.

@twophrasebark: It's the difference between mechanical (sale of a song in a fixed medium like a CD or nowadays mp3, ringtone, etc.) and a performance (playing of a song in a public setting) royalty. While I understand and agree with businesses like bars and nightclubs paying for the right to use music if that music is integral to their business, the ringtone as a public performance argument is a perfect example of the depths to which ASCAP/BMI (and to a lesser extent, SESAC) are sinking.

"Paying good money for a ringtone is stupid anyway. Symbian (i.e. Nokia) and Android phones should let you assign pretty much any common audio format as a ringtone."

And Windows Mobile.

@xtc46 - thinksmarter on twitter: Well, so does mine. Glad to be on the same page. It's a lovely thing.

A 30 second preview of a song is covered by "fair use laws", and a 5-15 second ringtone falls well within that.

[fairuse.stanford.edu]

Those pricks want more things "protected" by copyright while they lobby (read: bribe) politicians to extend copyright lengths to where it is now (90 years) and will do it again soon. Corporations hypocritically profit from works that are in the public domain, yet they fight tooth and nail to prevent the same happening to their own products.

I say we do what I've suggested before: Obey copyright laws as they used to be written, 50 years maximum, and freely distribute music that would have expired by that law. Teach the bastards a lesson with non-violent protest, and let them know it's being done.

@tackhouse1: Not to give the assholes any ideas, but the bastards at CASHGRAB, aka ASCAP, would have more success persuading phone makers to build their phones to use an RIAA-approved ringtone format and force everyone to buy from them.

Of course, that's called collusion and anti-competitive practices, but since when have multinational corporations ever been concerned with obeying the law?

Can you imagine how much money could be had if William Shakespeare's family was able to pull this crap for anytime "To be or not to be" has been used?

@Red_Eye: I hold the rights to that phrase. Please immediately send me $3 for it's use.

but a federal judge has ruled that your phone ringing does not constitute a public performance.

You mean watching some 30-something white guy madly scramble to silence the tinny, annoying noise of that 90s rap tune coming from some crappy phone speaker before it gets to the embarrassing line where it employs the "N" word isn't a public performance?

Oh, I beg to differ.

The industry that enforces copyrights is not the same industry that makes music. @tackhouse1:

@leprofie: I hold the rights to using the word "it's" when "its" should be used. Please send me $1 for the it's use.

@rpm773: But in order to charge for every instance of a ringtone play, it would have to be reasonably assumed that *every* time a person's phone rings, they are in public.

But yeah, I get it, you were being snarky.

@hairyseaword: Hehehe...nice.

@tackhouse1: Agreed on not buying ringtones, especially now that Verizon considers even previewing a ringtone on their own app as "data" so I get smacked with the $2 per megabyte data charge just for checking to see if that version of the Halloween Theme is any good.

P2KCommander for my Motorola FTW!

@Red_Eye: You mean like how MLK, Jr.'s, descendants are now doing, attempting to retroactively copyright things that WERE in the public domain when he first said them?

Anyone for a Flash mob on the ASCAP Headquarters. All walk in with our celphones set to MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This" ringtone and use Google Voice to ring everyone's phone simultaneously?

@tackhouse1: You're totally right about that. Too many folks in the entertainment business are slackers. They have one hit, then they think they shouldn't have to work another day in their next three lifetimes. I'm sorry, that's not how the world works for the rest of us that can't mooch off of 3 generations' worth of copyright royalties. Not even patents are so draconian. Imagine if drug patents lasted as long as copyrights currently do, drugs might cost a little less, but I guarantee there would be little incentive for the drug companies to research newer, safer, and more effective medications.

@P_Smith: Where on that page does it say that a 5-15 second ringtone falls into fair use?

I couldn't find it. Actually, what I *did* find on that page was that it's not that simple (and it's not). Your citation states "For example, it would not probably not be a fair use to copy the opening guitar riff and the words "I can't get no satisfaction" from the song, "Satisfaction."" [fairuse.stanford.edu]

If you could jam the riff and those words into 15 seconds, your citation seems to argue that it *wouldn't* be fair use. Your citation indicates that it's really case-by-case and based on the "heart" of the copyrighted subject matter.

BUT it's all beside the point anyway. Fair Use only kicks in as a defense AFTER a copyright violation has been proven up. The judge in this ringtone case said that because the playing of a ringtone is not a performance in the first place, there's no violation and, therefore, fair use isn't even invoked.

@billy: [cdt.org]

@P_Smith: actually I think it's longer than just 90 years, it's artist's life + 90. Originally I think it was only +20 for copyright when the US was founded.

I'm surprised a bunch of lazy companies haven't lobbied for longer patent terms. Both patent and copyright serve the same purpose for different things (that is, to make sure the creator of something useful or nice gets to reap the fruits of their labor.).

I mean the original intent of copyright and patent is to give incentive for budding entrepreneurs to quit their day job and write music, a novel, or develop some new device nobody can live without full time and be able to get a livelihood from doing that. Basically now though we're extending copyright into perpetuity so that corporations don't have to take risks on new material.

@skizsrodt: *you* don't have to do anything, but technically, it might be considered "performance", at least according to the definition, right?

[www.law.cornell.edu]

@skizsrodt: Although, to be fair, there are exceptions written into the statute which would probably exclude some dude cranking up his car stereo: Subsection 110(4) of Title
17

@chapoec: Apparently you don't read Gizmodo enough, because comments like that would get you banned on Gizmodo...

@MrEvil: The drugs would probably cost more if they knew they had researcher's lifetime + 70 years to milk the market. Or maybe since the drugs are designed by companies, it would the lifetime of an undying zombie corporation + 70 years.

Shoot - I was humming a tune to myself this morning. Did I need to pay the RIAA a performance fee?

And what about that song that was just "stuck in my head" over and over again yesterday?

A ringtone doesn't constitute a public performance, yet somehow playing music at my private wedding does.......I fucking hate the music industry.

@Eyebrows McGee (now with more baby!): The "I have a dream" speech was never in the public domain. King, himself, successfully defended his copyright only months after he made the speech. King's descendants only sought to keep the status quo.

[www.ca11.uscourts.gov]

Of course, it's all moot: Shakespeare's work is solidly in the public domain.

They should pay us for promoting their songs.

I wonder who the royalties for my fart ringtone would go to. Some guy in Des Moines could become quite rich.

@Scottidog: According to the RIAA, both of those cases are copyright infringement. Sorry, you're a felon.

@P_Smith: Most phones made for Japan and Korea used to be like that, actually. You couldn't load ringtones that didn't have their DRM signature. Of course, they didn't count on Chinese forums getting their hands on this "signature" (for Japan; Korean ringtone DRM was cracked by Russians, oddly enough); now ringtones are free and open.

@MrEvil: The intent of copyright has always been "To promote the Progress of Science" (science has long been interpreted as "human knowledge") not the progress of copyright holders (see US Constitution I, 8, 8). Copyright holders get protection, but they are only supposed to get "limited" copyright protection.

The problem with copyright extensions, it has been argued, is that they tend to negate the original intent: that at one point, the knowledge should be freely available to anyone. Extensions create a problem by moving that point distorting the original intent of the Framers.

With all due respect, your argument, that copyright was supposed to give incentive for creators to quit their day job, doesn't make sense. If that was the original intent of copyright, there would be absolutely no limit to IP protection.

@xtc46 - thinksmarter on twitter: Motorola KRZR K1M does the same thing. Isn't it grand? No more money wasted on ringtones that you can't take with you when you upgrade the hardware.

Irritating part is that the salespeople in the store had no clue. I asked if any phone supported making your own ringtones, and was told none of them do.

What I didn't get about the TV show part of the lawsuit, was that isn't the royalty taken care of by the show itself? Does Best Buy have to pay royalties if I buy a season on DVD? Sounds like they were just trying to double dip.

I just don't get ASCAP. A couple of years ago, I was creating a short video that was intended to be shown at a convention with an audience of about 800 people with one viewing only. I wanted to include a 15 second sample of a popular licensed song as background music during the video open (I had royalty free music that would be playing for the remainder of the video). The video was essentially a historical look at some old websites, and would announce the launce of a new website). I contacted ASCAP to inquire how much licensing for this song would be (explaining the circumstances, and further explaining that it would not be used to promote any products). They came back to me and said that "The song could not be licensed". No explanation like the creator did not want to license the song, or an extravagent license fee of $1,000,000, just a simple "NO".

I was willing to pay $1,000 for the 15 second snippet for a one time showing. I just don't get it, they are after a $0.02 payment for ringtones, but would not license a song to someone who was willing to pay a reasonable frr for the use of the song.