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A car repair firm has been taken to court accused of infringing musical copyright because its employees listen to radios at work.
The action against the Kwik-Fit Group has been brought by the Performing Rights Society which collects royalties for songwriters and performers.At a procedural hearing at the Court of Session in Edinburgh a judge refused to dismiss the £200,000 damages claim.
Kwik-Fit wanted the case brought against it thrown out.
Lord Emslie ruled that the action can go ahead with evidence being heard.
The PRS claimed that Kwik-Fit mechanics routinely use personal radios while working at service centres across the UK and that music, protected by copyright, could be heard by colleagues and customers.
It is maintained that amounts to the “playing” or “performance” of the music in public and renders the firm guilty of infringing copyright.
The Edinburgh-based firm, founded by Sir Tom Farmer, is contesting the action and said it has a 10 year policy banning the use of personal radios in the workplace.
Playing music
The PRS lodged details of countrywide inspection data over the audible playing of music at Kwik-Fit on more than 250 occasions in and after 2005.
It claimed that its pleadings in the action were more than enough to allow a hearing of evidence in the case at which they would expect to establish everything allegedly found and recorded at inspection visits.
Lord Emslie said: “The key point to note, it was said, was that the findings on each occasion were the same with music audibly ‘blaring’ from employee’s radios in such circumstances that the defenders’ [Kwik-Fit] local and central management could not have failed to be aware of what was going on.”
The judge said: “The allegations are of a widespread and consistent picture emerging over many years whereby routine copyright infringement in the workplace was, or inferentially must have been, known to and ‘authorised’ or ‘permitted’ by local and central management.”
He said that if that was established after evidence it was “at least possible” that liability for copyright infringement would be brought home against Kwik-Fit.
But Lord Emslie said he should not be taken as accepting that the PRS would necessarily succeed in their claims.
This item is infact a few days old, but i only just stumbled across it.
What is the bloomin world coming to when you can not even listen to the radio at work :shock:
The Uk has gone totally bonkers, first we have anti-piracy ad’s saying, you wouldnt steal a car, you wouldnt steal a purse, you wouldnt steal a movie, or whatever cr@p the ads said.
Don’t you just hate the warning’s you cant turn off, someone did, enough to make a parody :D
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRVHUbrbEUAThen the was the round of, piracy is linked to organised crime and funds terrorism.
I wonder what next….you wouldnt take your car to kwik fit?…..tell us something we don’t already know :P
Well I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was to find out that buying pirated DVD’s and CD’s funded organised crime :shock: << see
And then later finding out it also now funded terrorism :shock: :shock:
Then even later still that it funded drug dealers and human slave traders :shock: :shock: :shock:
So where I had once thought it was simply ordinary people downloading things off the net and then writing them off to DVD and CD to sell to people who most probably wouldnt have bothered buying or renting the crap to begin with if it hadnt been a cheap pirate copy it was first revealed they just looked like ordinary people, but were really mafia bosses who needed to sell copied disks in order to keep their racketeering and drug dealing businesses afloat
so I made a point of making sure never bought any off people called “don”, italians, people in ski masks or who were wearing stripey black and white shirts and never ever off people with tights on their heads and sawn off shotguns
Later I also stopped buying them off beardy muslim blockes with machine guns and time bombs
And then later still I decided that my conscience wouldnt let me buy them off afro carribeans with large bags of what looked like flour on their stalls or people who had a line of women in shackles hiding under the table
Now if the adverts are acurate that should have meant it would have been almost impossible to then get my fix of pirated wares once I had ruled all of those people out as potential sources, yet oddly enough it didnt seem to limit them in the slightest making me ALMOST start to wonder whether the adverts were indeed acurate or just scaremongering aimed at people who had undergone several lobotomies or who were born on canvey island
Kwik-Fit did the tracking wrong on my car once with the result that the new front tyres wore right down on the outer edges within a very short time. When I went back to complain they denied any responsibility and added they couldn’t check the tracking because the equipment was away being repaired! I went to ATS, who confirmed that the tracking was way out and rectified the situation. So anything that makes life difficult for Kwik-Fit is good in my books!
Admitting that the tracking equipment was away being repaired was, to say the least, self-incriminating on the part of Kwik-Fit.
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