geekroom

We had an interesting conversation with Diane today about the legality of setting up an streaming jukebox on the web for the office. We have one just for the geekroom (a web based mp3 jukebox that plays either queued up songs or random songs if nothing is queued), which has seemed okay since it is only playing in one physical room. However, we’d like to share the stream with everyone else in Baker and perhaps even other Berkman folks in other HLS buildings.

There seems to be an exception in the copyright code that deals specifically with playing background music in a business, but the exception specifically disallows an “interactive service,” which is basically anything that consists of a request. So it’s legal for us to stream the jukebox through the office, but only if we disable the queueing features. This would also mean that it would be illegal to buy a real jukebox that uses CDs and play it at the office, since a jukebox is an interactive service. For that matter, it would be illegal to play requested CDs at the office. If one person dictatorily decides which CDs to play, it’d be illegal, but if you let different folks choose the CDs throughout the day, that fits the definition of interactive and is therefore illegal.

Of course, we could just pay the webcasting royalty rates, but assuming our average employee listens to music 40 hours a week, we’d have to pay about $60 per week per employee listening. Whaddya say, John, can we afford $30,000 per year for an office jukebox?