What is a public performance copyright?
Federal copyright law provides that one may not publicly perform a copyrighted musical composition without the permission of the copyright owner. “Public performances” encompass a variety of things, such as: 1. Radio stations playing music. 2. Television stations playing music. 3. Live concerts. 4. Night clubs/bars with live or recorded music. (This includes jukeboxes!) 5. Stores playing music over a central sound system. (Home stereo size — two speaker systems — played in stores are excluded.) 6. Music on hold on telephone systems. 7. Music in elevators. As you can see from this list, the number and variety of sources where musical compositions are “performed” publicly is great. Given this, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that you’d have to possess a divine omnipresence to police every performance of your musical compositions at any given moment at every corner of the earth. So along came public performance societies to license and police performances of copyrighted
