The doctors who have TVs in their waiting rooms are probably being paid to have it there by some other company who is paying any royalties involved. The doctor is selling you to this other company so they can pump ads into you in a place where you can't get away. Why else would anyone subject their customers to bad TV?

As for businesses playing music for their customers, of course they should pay for it. I, for one, don't like the idea of others using my work without paying for it. The problem is in the way the royalty companies divide up the money, not in the fact that they collect it in the first place.

Going after boy scout camps for songs around the campfire seems like going a bit far. The boy scouts could get around that by either not organizing the singing in any official way or by leading only songs that are in the public domain. On the other hand, given the boy scouts' position on homosexuality, I'd just as soon they went out of business anyway.

The store I work for (an acoustic music store) got hassled by ASCAP several years ago for our music on hold system. My response was to select several CDs by musicians I knew did only original or traditional material and get written mechanical licenses from all of them. Next time ASCAP called I invited them down to review my licenses. They didn't take me up on it.

John Peekstok