This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Labels & Publishers Legal
Dodgy jukebox providers guilty of copyright crimes
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 19 March 2010
Oh, for the days when fighting piracy simply meant taking on shady operators who were running CD bootlegging facilities out of their garages, or were providing pubs in the North East with unlicensed jukeboxes, small groups of small-time criminals who could be easily targeted, arrested by the police, and locked up in dark damp cells to rot for eternity (well, given a sizable fine and six months community service).
Targeting these pirates was so much easier, and a lot less politically sensitive. Of course, such pirates still exist, and record label trade body the BPI and recording rights society PPL have just scored a result in their efforts to shut down one such shoddy operation, an unlicensed jukebox company operating from the Newcastle area called Access All Areas.
The three men behind the operation, Malcolm Wylie, his son Peter Wylie (not The Might Wah frontman) and William Ross, were arrested in 2008 and found guilty of copyright crimes this week.
A joint investigation by Gateshead Trading Standards, BPI and PPL found evidence to suggest the three men had made profits of hundreds of thousands of pounds during the seven years they ran the unlicensed jukebox operation.
The defendant’s corporate literature claimed they were licensed by both PPL and the relevant bit of PRS, but no such licences had ever been obtained.
Welcoming the conviction of the three men this week, PPL’s Richard Stewart told CMU: “This is the first joint PPL/BPI prosecution and I am very pleased to see it come to a successful conclusion with the conviction of all three defendants. The defendants supplied illegal audio/video jukeboxes to the leisure industry since 2001 and in this period had a turnover of over £3 million. It was quite apparent from the prosecution evidence that they traded through a series of phoenix companies defrauding not only our members of many hundreds of thousands of pounds of revenue but also deceiving scores of companies across the UK including hundreds of licensees who in good faith paid substantial sums to the fraudsters for what they were led to believe was a fully licensed system”.
The three men will be sentenced in early July.
