Newsletter
COPYRIGHT ISSUES CON-CERNING DVD MOVIES AND MUSIC IN HOTELS
In a recent interpretation, the Intellectual Prop-erty Office (IPO) stated that a hotel room is a ''place of transmission'' or ''place other than the place of transmission'' as referred to in the Copyright Act in respect of the public presenta-tion or public performance of copyright material. Therefore, before publicly presenting or per-forming a copyright work for unspecified per-sons, except within the scope of fair use, a hotel operator must obtain the consent of the owner of the economic rights in the work, the licensee, or the copyright intermediary organization of which the rights holder is a member.
The IPO further indicated that if a hotelier pro-vides equipment in hotel rooms for playing DVDs or other media, and guests themselves take optical discs into rooms and use such equipment to play movies or music, whether this constitutes public presentation or performance depends upon the facts of the individual case. For instance, if a hotelier not only provides playing equipment in rooms, but also provides a rental counter within the hotel (or near the hotel, whether on its own account or by arrangement with others) at which it rents to guests optical disc that are not authorized for rental, then the playing of such disc on equipment provided by the hotelier for guests' use may constitute public presentation or performance, and as such should require the prior consent of rights holders. But if guests bring disks into a hotel for themselves and play them on equipment provided by the hotel or on equipment that they bring themselves, this is not public presentation or public performance.