audience were merely members of the public who were paying two shillings a year for, among
other things, the privilege of being entertained, at intervals of a month or more, by a lecture or a
dramatic performance or in some other way. The section of the public from which they were
drawn was no doubt a comparatively small one, consisting, as it did, of the women residing in
the parish of Duston. But this can make no difference. ... The members were in no way bound
to one another by any domestic or quasi-domestic tie. The monthly meeting formed part not of
the domestic, that is of the private life of a member, but of her outside, that is to say, of her public
life. ... [T]here are about 5000 similar institutes in England and Wales with a total membership
of something like 300,000. If performances given before these institutes are private
performances, the result to the owner of the copyright in the works performed would be serious.LORD JUSTICE GREENE:[T]he expression “in public” must be considered in relation to the owner of the copyright. If the
audience considered in relation to the owner of the copyright may properly be described as the
owner’s “public” or part of his “public,” then in performing the work before that audience he
would, in my opinion, be exercising the statutory right conferred upon him; and any one who
without his consent performed the work before that audience would be infringing his copyright.
...If a lecturer makes his living by composing and delivering lectures to an audience wherever he
can find one, delivery by him of such a lecture to the members of a Women’s Institute ... would,
in my opinion, be a delivery of the lecture in public. ... [I]f a member of a Women’s Institute
obtained possession of a copy of the lecturer’s manuscript and without his consent delivered the
lecture to her fellow-members, I do not see how it could possibly be said that such a delivery
would not be a delivery in public. It would be a delivery to a body of persons desirous of hearing
the lecture, who have paid subscriptions with the object, among others, of obtaining that
advantage. ...- The public performance right may be infringed even if the
unauthorized performance benefits the author
Performing Right Society Ltd v. Harlequin Record Shops Ltd [1979] 1
W.L.R. 851 (U.K.: High Court)[The plaintiff, a collective society controlling the public performance rights for
musical works in the U.K., sued the defendant, which owned a chain of record
shops, for playing records in its stores without the plaintiff’s consent. The
plaintiff was willing to license the defendant, but the defendant said a licence
was unnecessary because it was not infringing copyright since its activities
benefited composers.]MR JUSTICE BROWNE-WILKINSON:[The defendants argue] that in considering whether a performance is or is not in public, a most
important question is whether the performance injures the composer or interferes with his
proprietary rights. Moreover ... it is also important to see whether the performance is given to
an audience from whom the composer would expect to receive a fee: this is ... the “owner’s
public”... Then the argument goes, since restraining performances in record shops would reduce
the sale of records (causing a corresponding drop in recording royalties received by the
composer), far from injuring the original owner of the copyright, performances in record shops(^96) positively benefit him. ...