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</head><body><p><br></p><blockquote type="cite"><div id="ox-89c11118e0" style="word-wrap: break-word;" class="">On 10 December 2016 at 02:17 "David (Niocast Digital)" <david@niocast.com> wrote:<br><span style="font-size: 15px; font-family: Arial;"></span><div class=""><div class=""><span style="font-family: ArialMT;"><span style="font-size: 15px;" class="">5. Unfortunately ‘</span><em style="font-size: 15px;" class="">all of us are not for profit</em><span style="font-size: 15px;" class="">’ doesn't include the artists at the heart of this - the writers, publishers and performers - each of whom want their slice of the copyright pie for the use of their works. Whether stations make a profit or surplus is neither here nor there for most of them.</span></span></div><div class=""><span style="font-family: ArialMT;"><span style="font-size: 15px;" class=""><br class=""></span></span></div></div></div></blockquote><p>I'm not sure that is entirely right David. I suspect quite a high proportion of original writers and performers (though maybe not the record labels) would be quite content for small-scale and not-for-profit stations to use their works, but they are effectively denied the ability to say so. The only contracts offered by the collecting societies are totally exclusive (within the UK at least), and explicitly forbid the original rights holders from reaching separate agreements or giving additional consent to third parties. So the writers and performers are faced with a 'take it or leave it' situation where they have to hand over all their UK rights to a collecting body, or handle all their own copyright royalty collection with every individual user (which is of course impractical).</p><p>Alex<br></p></body></html>