A “public performance” of music is defined in U.S. copyright law to include any music played outside a normal circle of friends and family that occurs in any
Performing rights are the right to perform music in public. It is part of copyright law and demands payment to the music's composer/lyricist and publisher. Wikipedia
Public performance right is the exclusive right of the copyright holder to perform a copyrighted work publicly. A public performance license is a legal agreement between the copyright holder and a music user that grants the music user permission to perform the copyrighted work.
The copyright performance of a play was a first public performance in the United Kingdom, staged purely for the purpose of securing the author's copyright over the text.
There was a fear that, if a play's text was published, or a rival production staged, before its official preview or premiere, then the author's rights would be lost; to forestall these abuses, the practice arose of staging a copyright performance, which was notionally public, but in practice staged hastily before an invited audience with no publicity and no regard for the artistic quality of the acting or production.
One legal authority wrote that such a performance, though probably not necessary to fulfill any legal requirement, permits registration of first performance at Stationers' Hall and gives useful public notice to possible infringers. The practice was common in the decades after the Berne Convention of 1886; the United States was not a signatory, and plays first staged there were uncopyrightable in the United Kingdom.
