If you have been blessing everyone around you with cell phone "performances" of Beyonc�'s "Single Ladies," rest assured that your cell phone provider won't have to pay royalties on it. A federal court has ruled that ringtones played aloud in public are not infringing on the content owners' copyrights because they don't constitute a true performance. (In other news, children are still allowed to sing songs without paying royalties.)

Joking aside (actually, that's less of a joke than you might think), the ringtone argument was made by the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP) earlier this year when it sued certain mobile carriers in the US in an attempt to force them to fork over royalties every time a customer's ringtone is played. Even though the carriers were already paying for download rights to the songs, ASCAP argued that each ring was a "performance" and therefore those download payments weren't enough.

This was because some ringtone providers did at one time pay for performance rights—some continue to do so, but others did not, due to an earlier court decision in a case involving AOL. The ASCAP felt the decision was wrong and wouldn't apply in this case because of some differences between normal music downloads and ringtones. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as a number of other interested parties from the music and technology industries, responded by arguing that ASCAP's complaint ignored some major areas of the legal code, likening the situation to demanding royalties when someone plays the radio with the car windows down.

In her ruling, US District Judge Denise Cote pointed out that the carrier has no way to control when a ringtone is being played and earns no revenue when it happens—customers decide when and where their phones can ring, and they turn the phone on or off without the carrier's consent. She also said that performing a work publicly usually means that it must take place in a public space where a "substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of its social acquaintances is gathered."

Regardless, Cote says that mobile carriers are only responsible for the transmission of the song to the phone, which doesn't count as a performance in and of itself. "Even if the customer could listen to the download as it was being received, and contemporaneously perceive it as the musical work, that would not constitute a public performance," wrote the judge. Additionally, there is no expectation of profit on the part of the carrier or the customer when the phone begins blasting Cher out of its tiny built-in speaker. This means even if it was a performance, it would be exempt from falling under royalty requirements.

As a result, the court ruled that ASCAP failed to show infringement on the part of cell carriers or their customers. The EFF, Public Knowledge, and the Center for Democracy & Technology applauded this decision, saying that it expands upon the AOL ruling by showing that any download—including ringtones—can't constitute a public performance, and that it should also protect people who play the radio on the beach or sing "Happy Birthday" to their children in a public park.