Copyright Law: Why Your Favorite Bar Can’t Show The Game On A 60″ TV

저작권과 관련된 아주 흥미로운 뉴스 기사




왜 식당이나 Bar에서는 60인치 TV로 방송이나 영화를 틀어줄 수 없는가? 저작권법 때문에 그렇다.





Over at GigaOm, they’ve delved into when it is and isn’t legal to share the game with a hundred of your brand-new, somewhat inebriated, closest friends.


If you’ve got a TV pulling broadcast signals from the air, it’s completely legal to have that TV showing something — even the Super Bowl or World Series — in a bar or restaurant provided that:
You don’t charge an admission or cover fee,
The bar or restaurant in question has less than 3750 square feet of space,
No more than four screens are showing the broadcast, and
None of the televisions are larger than 55 inches.


If those restrictions seem weirdly specific, well, they are. We saw earlier this year that the entire idea of “public performance” under the Copyright Act eventually doomed Aereo. So what makes a bar of 3700 square feet (but not of 3800) different?


It’s all thanks to particular concessions in a 1998 copyright extension bill.


The most recent round of copyright extensions guaranteed that nothing in the U.S. — literally zero works — would enter public domain until at least 2019. But it was the 1998 extension, as GigaOm explains, that expanded the “Homestyle Exception.”


As GigaOm points out, this is as much a practical concern as a philosophical one: “Netflix and Apple have to pay the content provider for a license so that they can serve the content to their subscribers. The less expansive the license, the less expensive.”


Verizon and Comcast certainly aren’t going door to door at every place in town, making sure every license is a properly paid commercial one, with it’s i’s dotted and t’s crossed. But you can still get caught, and if you do, your decision-making becomes penny-wise and pound-foolish in the worst way. Like taking your chances going 75 on a stretch of interstate with a 65 speed limit, it’s a risk — even if it seems like everyone else is doing it.


And it’s a surprisingly large risk, thanks to the joy of statutory damages that a court can award. One restaurant owner, as GigaOm points out, had to pay a $32,000 penalty for showing just one pay-per-view UFC match in his establishment.