Restaurant Radio Was Not Performance

In 1972, a man named George Aiken played a licensed radio broadcast through loudspeakers inside George Aiken's Chicken, his fast-food restaurant in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The broadcast included "The More I See You" and "Me and My Shadow," whose copyright owners, Twentieth Century Music Corp., sued because the restaurant had no ASCAP license of its own. A district court ordered Aiken to pay compensation, but an appeals court overturned the ruling. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Aiken, ruling that receiving songs through a radio did not constitute a public performance.

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