A License To Sing At Work????

Imagine this: You are at work listening to the radio. Your boss gets notified that if you have a radio playing that it cannot be within earshot of the customers of the store. The boss takes away the radio. You are now working in silence. So you sing to yourself to make yourself happy. You get a notice that you cannot sing at work without a performance license. You are also informed that if you continue you will be fined a hefty amount.

The BBC recently posted the story of 56-year-old Sandra Burt, a shop assistant. Please click the link to read the story and let me know what you think. What if this was over here in America?

I’m glad they apologized but still…. it should have never been.

Apology for singing shop worker

DJ Casper Suing Over Copyright And Publishing Rights

DJ Casper, the creator of the song "Cha Cha Slide," has filed a lawsuit against several parties.

According to the lawsuit filed December 31, he entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with M.O.B. Records in 2000. Songwriter Jerome Haywood has been named in the suit as the man who helped Casper fill out the copyright forms for the song. He feels that both Haywood and M.O.B. has cheated him out of royalties by taking the copyright and licensing for themselves and designating his composition as a “work for hire” project.

Casper goes on in the lawsuit stating that "royalties were never paid and [the] Plaintiff (DJ Casper) never received any accounting statements despite demands, and even as the song became very popular and, on information and belief, Defendant M.O.B. sold over 500,000 copies.”

He also believes that the parties obtained their own copyrights in order to take complete ownership of the hit 2003 record.

In 2007, the song was prominently used by McDonalds for a national Happy Meal commercial. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s U.S. and UK charts.