''Herbert v. Shanley Co.'', 242 U.S. 591 (1917), was a
United States Supreme Court
The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...
case in which the Court held hotels and restaurants that perform music must compensate composers, even if the venue is not separately charging patrons to hear the music.
[.]
The decision legitimized
ASCAP
The American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) () is an American not-for-profit performance-rights organization (PRO) that collectively licenses the public performance rights of its members' musical works to venues, broadc ...
, a group founded to collect license fees from businesses that wanted to play performance recordings by its members.
Because this case determined that playing music at the restaurants was an indirect way of profiting from the copyrighted music, it raised the question of what sort of indirect use would be ''too'' indirect to constitute infringement. Broadly speaking, this question was not anticipated by the Copyright Act and judges considered this a thorny problem. Nevertheless, courts made decisions indicating that commercial radio broadcasts and uses in advertising were sufficiently direct.
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External links
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1917 in United States case law
United States copyright case law
United States Supreme Court cases
United States Supreme Court cases of the White Court
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