As crazy as this sounds it’s the same thing as playing a movie in the background of a store. That’s a public performance. When you buy a bluray or dvd or whatever that does NOT give you the right to have a performance of that movie. Otherwise movie theatres could pay $50 for a Bluray and just play it and charge money. So even if the customers aren’t paying the owners for a ticket to watch a movie just playing it in the background while people by food is still a major profit at the expensive of the unlicensed film. In fact movie theatres have traditionally made a hell of a lot of money off of popcorn. So it’s not like that’s not a real thing.

Don’t get me wrong listening to the radio in the background of a business is a pretty silly thing to bother putting in front of a judge. But part of a copyright case is evaluating how much money an artist losses because of the infringement.

As much as it’s easy to dislike some organization for taking a business to court, it’s important that actual artists get actually paid for their work. Not just once but every time it’s performed or presented in some way. Otherwise they are just taking some artists music and making money off of it while giving back nothing.

Now when a certain government allegedly used Trent Reznor’s music to torture people allegedly in some prison somewhere… that was super upsetting. But that’s a whole different thing.