ASCAP, Girl Scouts, etc.

Regarding the "ASCAP vs. the Girl Scouts" matter:

A Man From ASCAP was interviewed on the radio this morning; as I rather suspected, this situation was not well reported and, while there *is* some possible impact on convention-filks, it shouldn't be too severe or unreasonable.

Item: the Girl Scouts in specific are, apparently mostly incidental to ASCAP's major goal, which was to put *profit-making* summer camps under its license umbrella. ASCAP was getting its data primarily from a trade group called the American Camping Association, which is mostly made up of for-profit summer camps (although a handful of Girl Scout camps are in the organization).

ASCAP's position is, not unreasonably, that the musical experience is part of the profit-making camps' appeal (I rather suspect, though it wasn't stated, that there are some music-oriented camps on that list), and thus that songwriters should be compensated for this profit-making use of their material.

This also points out that a key element of the definition of "public performance" is, indeed, "profit-making". If you are making money on the operation, you have to share. If not, there ought to be little problem.

(Note, incidentally, that filkdom is NOT entirely on one side of this issue. There are *two* major music-registry agencies, ASCAP and BMI, and there are filk-albums and music publishers who are signed with BMI--Sea Fire, for one. That assures that Heather gets $$ should WANDERLUST get radio airplay, for example. Some Firebird projects have also been labeled as BMI properties for this purpose, though not all.)

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As to impact on housefilks and conventions:

For housefilks and non-admission venues, I doubt that there is much if any impact. No $$ are changing hands, and even a large housefilk isn't big enough to make it worthwhile for ASCAP to go after. (The money we're looking at isn't big $$, either. A camp paying $500 is paying it for a full summer season--six or eight two-week sessions of 200 or so campers at a time, as the ASCAP rep described it. A single-day event with 30 or even 50 people is just not worth the effort of chasing down.)

For conventions, now--this gets more interesting. I believe OSFCI *did* get approached relative to Orycon and filk performances--but as OSFCI is a legally constituted nonprofit organization, and as only a modest percentage of what's performed is under unfriendly or registry-signatory copyright, I think they either went away or else Orycon includes a Very Modest Fee (probably less than $100, more likely half or 3/4 of that) in its filk budget to cover it.

It should be noted, though, that there are two cases where you *could* run into more significant registry fees--a convention run by a for-profit corporation (Baycon, for example), or one of the filk-specific cons (OVFF, ConChord). In either case, however, the matter would be something to be addressed at the concom or organizational level. (Alternately, songwriters can waive their royalty rights, in which case ASCAP/BMI won't collect.)

Bottom line:

The Girl Scouts are not likely to suffer much for this, nor are housefilks and other typical filk venues. Some conventions in some situations may find that they should be paying a modest fee--but that, to my mind, is NOT unreasonable, and the amount is not likely to be painful.

>> John C. Bunnell
>> j.bunnell at genie.com
Received on 08/22/96