Good afternoon everybody, happy Friday! We currently have smart TV’s in...

Good afternoon everybody, happy Friday! We currently have smart TV’s in our community spaces and fitness centers throughout our portfolio. On these TVs, we often will stream music and branded content. There is a company we’ve worked with in the past called BIM and are looking to cancel our services with them. They mention that we have to have some sort of license agreement in place on all of these TVs in order to stream music. My rebuttal to... Show more

Brent Williams

Kalyn Schutz BMI is a Performing Rights Organization (PRO) that "represents" and protects the copyrights of artists - that is the short of it. There are more than one PRO and there are claims from them that you will need more than one license (as in, one from BMI and one from ASCAP because there are overlaps of artists they cover). I had this same dispute a few years back and they are persistent. So it is not like you are streaming from their services like Pandora or YouTube, it is that anything that has copyrights (the works of an artist) must be covered by a license agreement to publicly play/broadcast/have-it-coming-out-of-whatever-device the music and apparently share the royalties with the artists. You playing a radio in your home is considered differently than you playing it in your office - even though we can argue that the radio station has the license to play music over the airwaves. You are likely to have to keep the license in order to publicly use the music at your community. You can do a... Show more

BMI is a Performing Rights Organization (PRO) that "represents" and protects the copyrights of artists - that is the short of it. There are more than one PRO and there are claims from them that you will need more than one license (as in, one from BMI and one from ASCAP because there are overlaps of artists they cover). I had this same dispute a few years back and they are persistent. So it is not like you are streaming from their services like Pandora or YouTube, it is that anything that has copyrights (the works of an artist) must be covered by a license agreement to publicly play/broadcast/have-it-coming-out-of-whatever-device the music and apparently share the royalties with the artists. You playing a radio in your home is considered differently than you playing it in your office - even though we can argue that the radio station has the license to play music over the airwaves. You are likely to have to keep the license in order to publicly use the music at your community. You can do a Google search on this and will come up with a plethora of information that you never thought you needed to know.

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