Movie night at your bar sounds like pure upside: a projector, a streaming login you already pay for, and a room full of customers buying drinks. Here is the part nobody puts on the flyer — pressing play for your customers is a public performance under federal copyright law, and the damages for getting it wrong start at $750 per movie and run to $150,000 per movie if a court finds the infringement willful. One unlicensed screening series can cost more than a year of rent.
This is not a theoretical risk that only hits big chains. Studios and rights holders license enforcement agents who check commercial establishments, send demand letters, and file federal suits against single-location bars, gyms, waiting rooms, and break rooms. The fix is far cheaper than the exposure: an annual umbrella license that usually costs less than a month of your internet and cable bills. This guide walks through what the law actually requires, which common excuses fail, what licenses really cost, and the narrow exceptions that might cover you.
Owning the Movie Is Not Permission to Show It
Copyright law gives the copyright owner the exclusive right to perform a work publicly. When you buy a DVD, rent a digital copy, or pay for a streaming subscription, you purchase the right to watch it at home — a private performance for your family and social circle. The moment the audience becomes your customers, the performance is public, and you need the copyright owner's permission.
The statute defines "public" broadly: any place where a substantial number of people outside your family and friends gather. A bar full of patrons, a gym full of members on treadmills, a waiting room full of patients, and even an employee break room all count. It does not matter that you legally bought the disc, that the streaming account is in good standing, or that you showed the movie exactly as the studio released it. None of that includes performance rights.
Streaming makes this doubly clear in the fine print. Major streaming services limit their plans to personal, non-commercial use only — Netflix's terms, for example, state the service is for personal, non-commercial use and may not be shared outside the subscriber's household. Logging into your personal account on the bar TV violates the subscription terms on top of infringing the underlying copyright. There is no "business tier" of a consumer streaming plan that fixes this; commercial streaming requires a commercial license from the rights holder.
The Excuses That Do Not Work
Almost every business owner who gets a demand letter believed one of these. None of them is a defense:
"We didn't charge admission." Whether you charged has no bearing on whether the performance was public. Free movie night at the brewery, cartoons in the pediatric waiting room, and films in the hotel lobby are all public performances. Charging admission can increase damages, but not charging does not create an exemption.
"We're a nonprofit / church / school." Copyright law applies equally to commercial and nonprofit exhibitors. Schools get a narrow face-to-face teaching exemption for instruction in a classroom — not for fundraisers, after-school entertainment, or movie nights. Religious services have their own narrow exemption for music performed in the course of worship, not for the youth-group movie night in the fellowship hall.
"The audience was small." There is no headcount threshold. Ten customers is a public performance just as surely as two hundred.
"It was just the TV in the waiting room." Showing a DVD or streaming a show on the waiting-room TV is a public performance. Leaving a broadcast on may qualify for the homestyle exemption described below — pressing play on anything you originated yourself never does.
"Nobody will know." Enforcement is a volume business. Licensing agents maintain lists of commercial establishments, follow social media ("Join us Friday for movie night!"), and send field representatives. Advertising the screening — the thing you must do to make it profitable — is also what makes it trivially discoverable. The posters and social posts are Exhibit A.
The Narrow Exceptions That Might Actually Cover You
A few statutory exceptions exist, and they are narrower than most owners assume. Read them as a checklist where every condition must hold:
The homestyle exemption (17 U.S.C. § 110(5)). Small establishments can play ordinary radio and TV broadcasts received on homestyle equipment without a license — but every one of these limits applies. Food and drink establishments must be under 3,750 gross square feet (excluding parking); other establishments must be under 2,000. For radio: no more than six speakers total, with no more than four in any one room. For television: no more than four screens, no more than one per room, and none larger than 55 inches diagonal. No cover charge for the performance, and the broadcast cannot be retransmitted beyond the premises.
Note what this exemption does not cover: DVDs, Blu-rays, streaming services, CDs, Spotify playlists, or anything else you originate yourself. It covers only retransmitting a broadcast you received — the game on the local channel, the radio station over the speakers. The moment you press play on your own media, you have left the exemption behind.
Face-to-face teaching (17 U.S.C. § 110(1)). Instructors and pupils can perform works in the course of face-to-face teaching in a classroom. This covers the film-studies professor screening a movie for the class. It does not cover the campus pub, the dorm lounge, or the fundraiser.
Religious services (17 U.S.C. § 110(3)). Music performed in the course of religious services is exempt. The exemption covers the service itself, not social events at the house of worship.
If your situation does not fit squarely inside one of these boxes, assume you need a license.
What a Movie License Actually Costs
For most small businesses, this is a solved problem with published products and predictable pricing. Two licensing companies dominate the market, and they sell different things:
MPLC Umbrella License. The Motion Picture Licensing Corporation sells an annual blanket license covering unlimited showings from its catalog — thousands of titles from major studios — for one flat yearly fee. Nonprofits, schools, and churches typically pay a few hundred dollars a year; commercial establishments pay more based on business type and size, with industry averages around $1,000–$1,500 per year. No per-title reporting is required. The tradeoff: the umbrella license covers unticketed showings and generally prohibits advertising specific movie titles to the public outside your venue.
Swank Motion Pictures (and Criterion Pictures). Swank licenses specific titles for specific screenings — the model you want when you need to promote the event by name or charge admission. Single-screening fees for a recent release typically run a few hundred dollars, scaling with audience size and title. Swank also offers annual licenses for ongoing programs, and it is the route for outdoor movies, fundraisers, and ticketed events where the MPLC umbrella's no-advertising restriction would defeat the purpose.
Which one do you need? A gym looping family movies in the kids' corner and a waiting room playing films on rotation want the MPLC umbrella: set-and-forget, unlimited showings, one annual fee. A bar planning a promoted summer series with posters naming each week's film needs Swank licenses per screening, because naming the titles in advertising requires it. Some businesses carry both. Either way, confirm in writing which studios and titles your license covers before you announce anything — catalogs differ, and "we thought it was covered" is not a defense.
The Enforcement Math: Why the License Is Cheap
Copyright owners can elect statutory damages instead of proving actual losses, and the ranges are set by Congress in 17 U.S.C. § 504: $750 to $30,000 per work infringed, at the court's discretion — rising to $150,000 per work for willful infringement. "Per work" means per movie: a ten-week summer series built on ten unlicensed titles is ten works, with a willfulness ceiling of $1.5 million. Courts can also award the copyright owner's attorney's fees to the prevailing party, which is why even cases that settle "cheaply" cost the business owner five figures once both sides' lawyers are paid.
Willfulness is easier to establish than owners expect. It does not require a villain monologue — courts have found willfulness in continued unlicensed performance after receiving a warning letter, or in deliberately avoiding learning the rules. The demand letter many owners ignore as a shakedown is, from the plaintiff's perspective, the document that upgrades the next screening from innocent to willful. And the innocent-infringer reduction (down to $200 per work) requires showing you had no reason to believe your conduct was infringement — a hard sell for a commercial establishment that advertised movie night on Instagram.
Compare that exposure to the compliance cost: roughly $1,000–$2,000 per year for blanket movie coverage at a typical single location. The license is not just cheaper than losing a lawsuit. It is cheaper than having a lawyer read the demand letter.
Sports Bars: The Parallel Trap
If you show live sports rather than movies, a different but adjacent trap applies: residential versus commercial TV service. Cable, satellite, and streaming packages sold for home use are priced for a household and licensed for private viewing. Showing them in a bar or restaurant violates both the service contract and, for pay-per-view events, the event's distribution rights. Rights holders and their licensing agents actively monitor commercial establishments during major fights and events, and the per-event penalties are similarly severe.
The fix is the commercial tier: business packages from your TV provider and commercial licensing for premium events (the per-event commercial PPV fee scales with your venue's capacity). If your "Sunday Ticket" or fight-night setup runs through a residential account or a consumer streaming login, that is the same category of exposure as the unlicensed movie night, enforced by the same playbook. Call your provider, price the commercial package, and treat the difference as a cost of doing sports-bar business — because it is one.
Don't Forget the Music
Movies are half the AV compliance picture; background music is the other half, and it works the same way. Playing Spotify, satellite radio, CDs, or a phone playlist over your speakers is a public performance of every song, and personal streaming accounts prohibit commercial use in their terms just as video services do.
Music requires blanket licenses from each performing rights organization (PRO) whose catalog you might play — ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR — because no PRO can license another's songs. For a typical small restaurant or retail shop, the combined annual cost across the PROs usually lands between $800 and $2,000 per year depending on square footage, speakers, and whether you host live or recorded music. The homestyle exemption above can cover plain radio or TV audio in a genuinely small space, but most businesses with curated playlists, satellite radio, or multiple zones need the licenses.
Budget AV compliance as one line: movies plus music together typically cost a single-location small business $2,000–$4,000 per year. That is the real price of sound and picture in a commercial space, and it belongs in your operating budget next to insurance and utilities — not discovered via demand letter.
Your Compliance Checklist
Work through this list once, then revisit it annually when licenses renew:
- Inventory every screen and speaker. List each TV, projector, and speaker zone, what plays on it, and where the content comes from (broadcast, DVD, streaming login, playlist). Anything you press play on needs a license.
- Kill the consumer logins. Remove personal Netflix, Spotify, and residential cable logins from business equipment. Replace them with licensed commercial sources.
- Buy the umbrella first. If you show movies routinely, get the MPLC Umbrella License (or equivalent) before the next screening. Add Swank per-title licenses for any promoted or ticketed events.
- License the music. Get blanket licenses from ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, and GMR — or switch to a business-music service that bundles the PRO fees into its subscription and confirm the bundle in writing.
- Check the sports setup. Verify your TV package is commercial-rated and that premium events carry commercial authorization for your capacity.
- File the paperwork where you can find it. Keep license certificates, renewal dates, and coverage confirmations with your insurance and business licenses. Calendar every renewal — a lapsed license is an unlicensed screening.
- Book it correctly. License fees are ordinary and necessary business expenses. Record each license as its own expense line (not buried in "miscellaneous"), attach the renewal schedule, and review the total annually the way you review insurance premiums.
That last step matters more than it looks. Compliance spending you track gets renewed; compliance spending you forget lapses, and a lapse is how a business that did everything right ends up explaining a gap in coverage. Clean books are part of the license working.
Keep Your Entertainment — and Your Books — Legitimate
Movie nights, background music, and fight nights are genuinely good business: they fill seats on slow nights and give customers a reason to stay for one more round. The licensing behind them is a small, predictable operating cost — a few thousand dollars a year that buys unlimited showings, promotional rights where you need them, and freedom from the demand-letter business model. Price it into the event the way you price the extra staff and inventory, and it pays for itself many times over.
Keeping those licenses, renewals, and entertainment expenses organized is exactly the kind of routine bookkeeping that prevents expensive surprises. Beancount.io provides plain-text accounting that gives you complete transparency and control over your financial data — no black boxes, no vendor lock-in. Get started for free and see why developers and finance professionals are switching to plain-text accounting.
