Double Dipping Denied

Filed in archive Industry , Legal on April 25, 2007

A federal judge ruled that online music services from companies like Apple, RealNetworks, and Yahoo do no have to pay a performance fee when a customer downloads a digital song. The music clearinghouse ASCAP had filed suit to force fees based on the claim that digital transmissions constituted a public performance. US Register of Copyrights Marybeth Peters also opposed the lawsuits, which she said lacked "common sense and sound policy counsel."

The online services had claimed that a download was not a transmission and that such a fee would be "double dipping", as they already pay the music publishers for both streaming and downloaded music.

The court agreed, "Although we acknowledge that the term 'perform' should be broadly construed ... we can conceive of no construction that extends it to the copying of a digital file from one computer to another."