Due to licensing laws, companies can be charged a large sum of money to do viewing without permission. Local Mom and Pop Shops are now at the mercy of these laws, hindering the possibility of making profit if they want to do a viewing and only charge to keep their lights on.
If businesses fail to abide by these laws, they can face court action or be forced to pay large fines. I believe this course of action is unjust for small businesses.
According to paaba.org, Mom and Pop Shops are usually small, independently owned family businesses. Some of these shops already have to overcharge customers in order to compete with the popularity of bigger corporations. They also create customized products or host unique events to draw in more customers.
By forcing owners to abide by licensing laws, money is directly being taken away from their businesses.
Customers also suffer. The best way to create something new is to follow the example of something that has historically been done successfully. Customers are directly losing the quality of new, innovative things. Unfortunately, at this point, there are very few things that can be done 100 percent originally.
I do believe that some licensing laws should be enforced. I even believe that fees should be charged to businesses, but, these fees should only be enforced in large venues, like movie theatres, and the fees shouldn’t be over half of the profit earned by the event.
I don’t believe that a theatre in a college should be forced to pay a large fee to show a movie to students, which has happened in the setting of educational institutions because they are not recreating or redistributing the movie. They are simply showing it on a larger scale outside of a home setting.
Large fees should only be charged to businesses that can afford them, only if they have used a sufficient amount of the original work, or have tried to redistribute or recreate it. If this business shows the original movie or play, then some of that money should be awarded to the creators.
In no case should someone be allowed to copy the work that someone else has done and claim it as their own, but, there should not be laws in place that takes money from businesses that are not capable of paying it.
Whether it’s a local Mom and Pop Shop, community theatre or any other small business, they should have the right to show viewing of movies and adapt them.
The entire point of art is supposed to be using your creative talents, distributing it and creating a safe environment to discuss it. It’s supposed to be a learning experience. I truly believe that Mom and Pop Shops are not trying to harm whoever owns films, or other bodies of work. They are only trying to show great works of arts to their customers and the local community wishing to create a night of fun that may be difficult to come by in a small town.