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Girl Scout Camps and Copyright Infringement

When you own the copyright for a song or other original work, you don’t just have the exclusive right to record it and create other tangible reproductions. You also own the sole rights to broadcast or perform the song in public. Technically, then, any band or group performing a cover version of one of your songs owes you royalties, as does any hold music an office might play over its phones, which counts as a broadcast.

Since it would be logistically impossible for each band or composer to collect its own royalties from these performances, intermediaries known as performance rights organizations exist. These organizations, the largest two of which in the U.S. are the non-profits BMI and ASCAP, manage huge portfolios of songs, collect royalties from music venues, bars, restaurants, and other places live covers or recorded music are played, and then reimburse the copyright holders.

This system’s interesting, to be sure, but what does it have to do with the Girl Scouts? In 1995, ASCAP decided that summer camps were getting away with publicly performing copyrighted campfire songs without paying any licensing royalties. From a legal standpoint, ASCAP was within its rights, but its request that even large non-profit camp directors pay annual fees of as much as $1400 or face six-figure fines or a year in prison didn’t sit well with the public. Girl Scout camps were hit particularly hard, and TV reports and a major story in the Wall Street Journal recounted tales of young lasses having to learn the Macarena in silence.

Public opinion swayed against ASCAP as further tales recounted birthdays passing with no singing of “Happy Birthday” lest a camp director be forced to spend hard time, and the copyright holders eventually relented. ASCAP now charges the Girl Scouts $1 a year to license its portfolio, a symbolic compromise that reasserts the group’s ability to demand these kind of fees.