Finland’s supreme court has decided that cabbies who play music in their cabs while driving passengers must now pay royalties for “public performance” of 22 euros (about $21 USD). Many cabbies are turning the radios off now, but Teosto (Finnish RIAA) is trying to make deals with the Taxi unions so that royalties are collected for all taxis.

Aren’t the radio stations already paying royalties to play the music? Why charge the cabbies and ultimately the passengers also? How far can we push this? Let’s see… 1) Charge artist royalty for recording the song, 2) charge recording engineer royalties for playing the song back during the mastering process, 3) charge the CD duplication facility royalties for pressing the CDs of copyrighted music, 4) charge the manufacturers of playback devices royalties for the ability to play back the music 5) charge consumers royalties for anything that could be used to store music, be it CDRW, magnetic media, flash memory, DVDs, video tapes, film (could record pictures of the waveforms on a screen), etc. 6) charge the radio station for playing the song 7) play the listeners for hearing the song… each time they hear it 8) charge the listener for the ability to hum or sing the song later…. I could go on.