As the owner or manager of a karaoke venue, you can be held liable for the actions of your contracted karaoke hosts. If they are running pirated song content and you have been made aware of this and do nothing about it, you can be sued for copyright and/or trademark infringement, which could be very costly to you and/or your venue.

The program is simple. As the owner or manager of a karaoke venue all you have to do is sign up for our free program, and require the karaoke hosts you hire to fill out a simple, two-page form and have them produce their sets of the KIAA producer member’s discs for a brief review. If you register each host’s form and review results with us, the KIAA producer members will not sue you for infringement of our intellectual property rights based upon your host’s activities or status.

Note that this is the producer members of the KIAA’s offer of “safe harbor” for you. The karaoke host likely has many different manufacturers’ products on his system, which means you bear a potential liability for all the other content on his system as well. To avoid potential problems with other manufacturers, we suggest that you be equally thorough in requesting evidence of original discs for all of the host company’s songs. Further, if they are known to have multiple systems in other venues, they need to have multiple sets of original discs as well.

You might wonder why such a program is necessary. In 2009, in response to this overwhelming piracy, KIAA producer member Sound Choice began to enforce its intellectual property rights more vigorously by initiating lawsuits in several states against hosts and venues that were using unauthorized copies of accompaniment tracks to make money and against pirates selling illegal systems preloaded with content. To date, Sound Choice has filed ten federal lawsuits and more are planned.  Chartbuster has just filed its first lawsuit and Stellar is in the investigation process to prepare for their first filing.

Learn more about the lawsuits.

In those suits, there are three kinds of defendants:

• Karaoke hosts who own their own karaoke systems
• Venues that own their own systems
• Venues that contract with hosts or karaoke companies to provide karaoke services.

The Verified Compliance Safe Harbor Program is designed for venues who contract with hosts to provide karaoke services. It was developed so you can learn about your potential liability and avoiding piracy, and provide a way to make certain that the hosts you hire are operating legally, and avoid a lawsuit.

It benefits karaoke hosts by educating them about the right way to operate–and it gives legal karaoke hosts an important advantage over their competitors.

This program benefits the producer members of the KIAA by making it easier to track unauthorized activities, so that karaoke hosts who are operating against the law and our policies can get legal and stay legal.