United States Supreme Court

TWENTIETH CENTURY MUSIC CORP. v. AIKEN, (1975)

No. 74-452
Argued: April 21, 1975

Decided: June 17, 1975

Facts:

"George

Aiken's

Chicken"

is

fast

food

restaurant

in

Pittsburgh,

Pennsylvania, owned and operated by George Aiken. Food can be

purchased and consumed inside of the store or ordered and taken out.
Inside the store, radio station broadcasts are played over loud speakers
that are audible to anyone in the restaurant. On March 11, 1972, two songs
copyrighted by Twentieth Century Music Corp. were played over the radio
and heard by customers in the restaurant. While the radio station
broadcasting the songs was licensed by the American Society of
Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) to play them, Aiken's
establishment was not.

The petitioners of the case were Twentieth Century Music Corp., which
owned the copyright to one of the songs, "The More I See You", and Mary
Bourne, who owned the copyright to the other song, "Me and My Shadow".
The petitioners claimed that Aiken's broadcast of their songs in his

establishment violated their right to publicly perform their work for profit.
While the United States District Court for the Western District of
Pennsylvania initially sided with the petitioners and required that Aiken
provide monetary compensation for the copyright infringement, in 1975 the
United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit overturned the ruling,
stating that the respondent did not infringe upon the petitioners' right under
the Copyright Act "[t]o perform the copyrighted work publicly for profit" since
the radio broadcast in the establishment was not equivalent to a
"performance". A similar decision was made in earlier court cases such as
Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists in 1968 and Teleprompter Corp. v. CBS in
1974.

Issue:

Whether or not the radio reception in Aiken's restaurant of the licensed

broadcasts infringed the exclusive rights of petitioner to "perform" their
copyrighted works in public for profit.

Held:

No. Respondent did not infringe upon petitioners' exclusive right, under the
Copyright Act, "[t]o perform the copyrighted work publicly for profit," since
the radio reception did not constitute a "performance" of the copyrighted

songs. Fortnightly Corp. v. United Artists, 392 U.S. 390 ; Teleprompter

Corp. v. CBS, 415 U.S. 394.

Reason:

Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation

must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of
literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright
law is to secure a fair return for an "author's" creative labor. But the ultimate
aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public
good.

Significance of the Decision:

To hold in this case that the respondent Aiken "performed" the petitioners'
copyrighted works would thus require us to overrule two very recent
decisions of this Court. But such a holding would more than offend the
principles of stare decisis; it would result in a regime of copyright law that
would be both wholly unenforceable and highly inequitable.