Ringtone royalties are music to these ears

摘要

This splendid idea inexplicably managed to raise a ruckus right before the holiday weekend: Every time a musical ringtone plays in public -rnsuggests the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers - carriers should pay a royalty for the "performance," a cost that would unfortunately need to be passed along to wireless phone users.rnConsumer advocates and online pundits, whipped into a lather by an unusually shortsighted Electronic Frontier Foundation, turned their amplifier dials up to 11: "This is an outlandish argument from ASCAP," huffed an EFF attorney. "Are the millions of people who have bought ring-tones breaking the law if they forget to silence their phones in a restaurant? Under this reasoning from ASCAP, it would be a copyright violation for you to play your car radio with the window down!"