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Yeah Soma is great!... I highly recommend Radio Paradise (also listener supported) they have a new AAC stream and play a good selection of eclectic rock.

Electromagnetic noise generated by the digital circuits and picked up in the analog circuitry of the sound card, making an audible buzzing and crackling sound that is most obvious when listening to what should be silence, but is often noticable in a lot of music.

I have a really nice pair of Grado Labs headphones and can't stand listening to music on my PC.

Fortunately I have three macintoshes, which all have better audio engineering. Despite posting this message from a win2k PC, I'm listening to Radio Paradise on iTunes running on my Blue & White G3 Mac.

Prefer Linux? Linux sounds best when run on Apple hardware. I also use XMMS sometimes, on an ancient Power Macintosh 8500 that runs Debian Sarge.

Really, I believe the Internet needs to be the next generation radio, instead everybody is trying to figure out new pricing plans or protocols to hose the consumer or the artists. What I want is a way to discover new talent FOR FREE, new music FOR FREE, and be given some reason for faith that the rest of the CD is good too.

Kinda like... Internet radio? I ran Stationripper on http://www.radioparadise.com/ for a couple of days and found tons of new stuff.... "FOR FREE"

I uninstalled RealPlayer quite a while ago, because it kept hawking the paid upgrade at me, but I do find the occasional realmedia stream I would like to listen to, with no other options, so perhaps you could give me the URL of where they hide that elusive free version.

In return, I'll give you a link - right now I'm listening to Radio Paradise in streaming MP3. Best internet radio station on the planet, just now featured in Time magazine.

... you just have to know where to look. It's extremely rare that I listen to mainstream radio. Instead I listen to KCRW (a listener-supported Los Angeles radio station known for its eclectic music programs and for giving many fabulous musicians their first airplay) and Radio Paradise (an internet radio station that describes what it plays as "eclectic intelligent rock"). I've discovered a number of bands that I absolutely love through these stations, and I never would have heard them on mainstream radio. -David

I like Apache::MP3 also. Namp! is the name of the project when all the bits are rolled together (apache, mod_perl, perl, Apache::MP3). Also CPAN is your friend.

There's a demo site so you can see the default interface and try some streams (Apache::MP3 includes a "demo" mode which stops the streams after 30 seconds).

You can block casual access with a simple .htaccess file. I'm pretty sure it *will* work on Windows, Apache, perl, & mod_perl are all available on the platform, it's just more work because all those components aren't already there.

I'll tell you two problems I've run into. If you use username/passwords in .htaccess to secure it, the username & password will be a part of the URL for each streamed track and may be clearly visible on the desktop, depending on which streaming client you're using. Also some older clients may not work with URLs that include the user:pass in it. It's been a while but I think Windows Media Player was the one that gave me the most trouble.

Embedded album art in a track may also cause trouble for some clients, specifically iTunes and RealOne (v9 at least, haven't tried the beta). In my testing the album art was added by MusicMatch and iTunes adds them another way (so each app can't see the other's album art) so how the art is added to the track may be a factor. Actually, I think it's more likely that some clients just can't handle streaming tracks with too many bytes of ID3 tag data but I haven't tried any experiments to prove it.

Whether or not you can fast forward or rewind *within* a track depends upon the client. WinAmp does it like a champ. I'm pretty sure Xmms does too. iTunes does not. Someone has told me RealOne Player can do it but it hasn't worked for me.

iTunes is a bad streaming client because it permanently adds each streamed track to your Library. You have to manually select and delete them to clean it up.

If you don't want to bother streaming your own music, I recommend the "Internet radio station" RadioParadise. 128Kbps (or lower in a variety of formats, eclectic, listener-supported, no ads.

"eclectic online rock radio".

Hi!

I'm in rural America, and I've used a variety of methods for Internet access over the years: a 56K frame-relay circuit, ISDN, a fractional T-1 circuit, and now DirecWay. Some thoughts:

• DirecWay ain't a T-1 circuit
  There is little comparison. The "two-way" DirecWay service is high-speed download, and essentially 56K upload. If you're doing a lot of uploading (particularly of graphics) that's a bad thing. If you're uploading text, it isn't that noticeable. On the other hand, you definitely will notice the latency. It's annoying.
  
  On the other hand, DirecWay is dramatically cheaper. You can buy the "modem" up front and pay $59/month, or capitalize the "modem" over 15 months for a total charge of $99/month; after 15 months your rate drops to $59/month. I viewed the cost of the device as equivalent to buying a router--its a capital expense. I can tell you with a broad smile on my face that $59/month is a LOT cheaper than the $450/month I was paying for a fractional T-1. (I dropped the T because I'm no longer doing offsite development for clients--I took a full-time position, so I don't have as much need for the bandwidth.)
• You will need two dishes
  We learned this the hard way: DirecWay and DirecTV actually broadcast from different satellites. The way they provide service from both is to aim the dish at a compromise position. The result is poor signal strength from either TV or Internet. Our satellite guy came out last week, saying that DirecWay had emailed all of their installers to install a separate TV dish. It makes your roof more cluttered ("I heard you went to work for client," said a neighbor. "Was it the NSA?") but it will definitely settle the question of who is the biggest geek on the block.
• Once you're past the latency, it rocks
  Once you're past that initial latency hit, download speed is remarkable. While there were benefits to having the T-1 circuit, I'm 28,000 feet from the CO, so packet loss was a persistent problem. Internet radio is better, and watching broadband TV is MUCH better.

Overall, we're very happy with it.

yeah, right, your going to convince me to stop listening to Music that Doesn't Suck for some theo song?

1) I'm still partial to these from Iriver (note firmware upgrade to mass-storage device). With either one:

• I have my files, radio and music when I travel.
• I can schlep new MP3's from the home server.
• I can pull some tricks with a loopback device and filesystem in a file to get ext3 support.

3) CD, yes, neat, want one; but not too carry around. It's too damned big. The biggest iRivers are close to CD in MB and you're not schlepping media left and right.

Take me as an exmple, I will now be downloading an enormous amount of 'tunes' from those groups on your website (THANKS, I've been looking for new sites with FREE tunes). And with each, the artificial barrier that is holding up the RIAA is crumbled somewhat! Once the RIAA is no longer the gatekeeper, the market will find a new equilibrium.

Try Web Radio. I listen to Radio Paradise. No commercials. Interesting, sounds fine, NO COMMERCIALS (except to remind folks the station is entirely listener supported). I can listen for hours at a time without getting sick of the same ol' crap.

For consumers like me (happy to hear diverse stuff all day long with no commercials), why would I ever need to buy another CD? I'm sure Mr. Bainwol will have a good answer, but passing a law requiring me to buy a CD probably isn't going to pass.

cheers,

-ptah

Off to download tunes with a license I can live with.

Likewise with internet radio, fine for voice, but when it comes to music I would rather listen to an FM radio station with decent sound quality.

FM radio isn't exactly hi fidelity. I don't know that it is better than a good Internet station, I'll have to compare.

The nice thing about a home system is you can set up your own MP3's (or ogg's) at the quality level you want--heck you can even play lossless files if you like ( roughly 10 MB/minute for a non-encoded CD is 1 1/3 Mbps if I did my math right).

And you get much more control

That's important. My playlist and my wife's will have a lot of overlap but she doesn't like punk or industrial and I don't like jazz. The ability to choose what I or she or we like is quite nice.

And I'd like a reference to signal loss using CAT5 cabling. Honestly. Just saying it negates benefits doesn't make it so, but if you are right I want to know before I wire my own house! :-)

The whole notion that Pro Tools and my personal favorite Cool Edit Pro (someone please make a Linux clone or port it with Wine or something!) will make the recording industry sell CDs for less is absurd.

Look guys, everyone here on Slashdot is always talking about the music revolution where the artist produces and markets their own music. Well its here now and guess what? It completely sucks.

Now it is super cheap and easy to get great results at home (if you have a clue what you are doing and most people DON'T!). You don't need expensive recording studios or audio technicians worth beans. The good part is that. I've been able to do a lot of my own production far cheaper than before and it sounds better, because I know what I'm doing and have been trained in the area.

The bad part is that so can Joe Sixpack and his band. Nobody thinks they need help, but 99% of people out there really need a second pair of ears (and someone with experience) more than they need high-tech recording gear.

Recording studios know this. Overproduced or not, Brittany or whatever decent looking bimbo they find on the Mickey Mouse club is easier to market than any good band that isn't pretty (thanks MTV). Now these unpretty, but good muscians are less likely to get a contract, partly because of filesharing.

An intelligent rock(jazz or whatever) band generally has a more sophisticated audience than Brittany Spears. Do most of the Slashdotters download Spears? Probably not. Whereas Boy Band audiences are less into technology.

Isn't it interesting how the free music revolution helped to kill real music? You guys got your free music and from here on out, that's what most of it is going to be worth no matter what Apple or anyone else makes us pay for it.

Whether or not filesharing is actually hurting revenue for bands themselves is another question, but in the eyes of a record company what makes more $$$? Do you think a real group would be more profitable or Brittany? In most cases, Brittany and the Boy Bands. They're also a lot less likely to try and bite the hand that feeds them a la Pearl Jam, Ticketmaster and MTV.

So now these good muscians who can't get a record deal can at least produce themselves, but the results are usually pathetic. Go on MP3.com and show me any really good homerecorded bands. Then tell me how long it took you to find them. Then tell me if you are actually going to go see them in concert.

Love 'em or hate 'em we need record companies, radio to sort through the crap so the cream can rise to the top. Kazaa or any of the other filesharing systems don't really expose you to new things. The only good music broadcast out there these days is at radioparadise.com. Tune in. You'll be glad you did.

Sigh,

Your "2.5 times" is too high, even for the comparison we're making. An used, unmodified, M$-restricted XBox vs. a brand-new, under-warranty computer?

Sure, I'll buy your argument if all I wanted to do was play some music, watch some disks, and play some games. But I can buy a $60 DVD player that plays MP3s, DVDs, VCDs, and will even do slideshows of JPEGs, all with digital audio and component video. So an used XBox, for 2 times that price, will let me play some games as well. w00t.

But we're not talking about that. We're talking about turning an XBox into a computer by hacking it to boot Linux. That means you're voiding any warranty that you might have had, and if you're buying used, there probably isn't much left anyway (and who knows what shape it's in? It is used, after all! That "nice" remote might have been chewed on by someone's dog)...

If you really want to go the financial argument route (siighh), let's compare apples to apples (not Apples, silly, that's another argument! ). A new XBox, according to Amazon, is going to cost you $200, plus a DVD-playback kit, which will cost you another $30. Ok, so we're talking $230 already, and you haven't even modded it yet. That's going to cost you another $50, and you're probably going to have to solder some wires. That will also make it impossible to use the Live service, so if you wanted to play games online, oh well...

So! Aren't you CLEVER! You've created a fairly inferior computer (8 GB HD?? 64 MB RAM??) that will run a fairly new and shaky version of Linux. That's cool! You've saved yourself at least $30 by doing the soldering yourself!

The $305 machine I described will even be cooler if you throw another $70 at it and get a wireless keyboard and mouse. Then you can stick the box anywhere out of sight (and hearing) and be able to *additionally* play DivX movies and streaming Internet radio (which I'm listening to through my stereo right now) chat with friends all over the world, browse the 'net, manipulate photos, check your e-mail, and all the other cool things real computers can do, using a tried and tested, feature-packed, easy-to-install Linux distro.

Again, I think it's a very cool thing to do as a hobby project. But please, don't try to tell me it's an economically sound thing to do! An XBox is not, in your words, "suited for the job" of being a good Linux computer...

Rather than another of Steve Jobs proprietary projects, how about something that's open source?

While I don't know if the code has been made publicly available, there is a guy who has built up his own studio automation system. Linux Journal featured Bill Goldsmith in this article on KPIG.com and Radio Paradise. In the print article, there was talk of making his studio software available, it might be worth contacting him for details.

I know that if I were in the radio biz, I'd much rather have a system as much under my control as possible. This also includes scrapping mp3 in favor of Ogg as this recording studio professional did (while the article is supposed to be about Linux, the deeper story is about the use of Ogg files).

There are a few good independent web-only radio stations out there that could potentially be part of the solution. Radio Paradise is one of the very best -- totally listener supported, and a truly excellent mix of stuff you've heard of and stuff you haven't. I'm pretty sure they are always on the lookout for good, unknown music. (Plus, having more listeners might benefit them if some percentage of those new listeners donate a few dollars.)

Who cares about local radio? Except for public radio, it's mostly junk in southern California. XM Radio has some potential, since it is commercial free, hence more customer-driven.

Of course, online there's always Radio Paradise.

Although XM Radio already does have a AAA station (Adult Album Alternative), I doubt it is as good as Radio Paradise.

Paradise is similar in some respects to a radio station we had in southern California, KSCA 101.9 FM (LA's Finest Rock!), which was for a time the only place where you could listen to good new music. It was bought and replaced with a Spanish station. Another AAA station came out of the ashes, but it too was bought and converted to Spanish-language format. Now, the southern California radio market is a vast musical wasteland, with the exception of KMZT 105.1 classical, and the KPRW 89.9 public radio station (which is good but very eclectic).

Which all goes to show why I would be willing to fork over $10/month if I could get Paradise in my car. One would think the recording industry would have a clue. I haven't bought a single CD since the last AAA station went off the air in southern California, years ago. After listening to Radio Paradise for a few weeks, I've already targeted 5 CDs which I'll be buying shortly.

Incidentally, my list is:

Aimee Mann - Bachelor #2
Pat Metheny - Works
Coldplay - Parachutes
Cowboy Junkies - The Trinity Session
Stevie Ray Vaughn and Double Trouble - The Real Deal: Greatest Hits 2

Radio Paradise is struggling to pay the new webcaster royalties, which are completely stupid. The recording industry won't be happy until they've squashed every outlet for new and interesting music, and they wonder why CD sales are down!! :-(

In their zeal to "free" intellectual property, hackers are destroying the Internet.

First of all, this is a complete non-sequitur. The bill in question is not about "freeing" IP, it's about making the royalty rates for webcast music reasonable. RTFA.

Hackers, with some help from Al Gore, invented the internet as you know and love it today. If it's being destroyed by anybody, it's the large, moneyed corporations who see it as nothig more than a global platform for sending advertisements.

Downloading (or worse, streaming realtime) huge binary files is a classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons.

Oh it is not! Transferring data (binary or otherwise) is the whole point of the internet. That's what it is for. Do you really think that streaming is worse than downloading? That was a joke, right?

A few people have this insatiable need to play music directly from the Internet instead of just buying the CD and the rest of us get enormous ping times.

Shenanigans. The idea that streaming audio is bringing the internet to its knees is too idiotic to be even laughable. I'm streaming right now from Radio Paradise. It's using 8k/s of my bandwidth.

is FUD has spread to the Register, which i usually associate with something pretty close to reality in an information source. bummer.

more info and yet another point of view at Bill's RadioParadise (scroll down to the comments section).

They are donation based, commercial free, and are also up against CARP, but seem to be hangin' in there.

The official billing for this streaming station is "eclectic intelligent rock" which pretty much fits my listening needs. I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to listen to music - it's not pissed anyone off in my office, so far ;-)). Oh, and support them if you can - they are the future, IMHO.

Further, a spin-off of KPIG is what I listen to all day: Radio Paradise. It has no commercials; mainly funded by donations, but gets a small kickback from CDs sold by referral to CDNow.

As a bonus - when their stream (from shoutcast) is interrupted, I know that some route is screwed up on the web - and I can quickly check to see if ATTBI is screwing up again...which seems to be 20% of the time a route is down.

With multicast, the distribution process is spread out across routers, so it's much less likely that the same bits will cross the same wire twice. If multicast routers were ubiquitous, the same bits would never cross the same wire twice.

If you think about it, this is a fantastic deal - one of the big problems with broadband right now is that the broadband provider has a nice fat pipe to each subscriber, and a similarly fat pipe to the whole rest of the world. So there's a lot of contention on the pipe to the outside world, whereas the pipe to your house is mostly idle. With multicast, a 192kbps feed down the pipe to the outside world can put 192kbps on a significant percentage of the customer pipes. So the ISP can feed much more data to the subscriber for much lower cost.

Interestingly, this also works to the webcaster's advantage - if you want to set up a webcast service on your home machine, it's no skin off the ISP's nose, because you're not pushing 192kbps *per listener* out their pipe to the world - you're pushing a total of 192kbps, which is much less expensive for them. This reduces their incentive/ability to provide lopsided connectivity, where you can receive a lot but send only a little.

My only worry is that AOL might be deploying something proprietary and non-interoperable, and then the ISPs will wind up paying for a system that we can't use this way, even though it would have cost the same as a system we could use this way.

A fight between the 800 pound gorillas and the public suffers.

You could launch a record and get it played on the radio for cheaper but it won't be on Clear Channel. Clear Channel does all kinds of evil stuff besides that, like piping in remote DJs and making you think they are local.

This sort of battle was inevitable when the FCC lifted regulations on radio ownership.

The solution for you, the public might be to try to patronize stations that are not conglomerate owned.

I DO listen to one radio station that is both terrestrial and internet streaming: 97X out of Oxford Ohio. Here's some of the NEW stuff I'm enjoying..
Elvis Costello
Hives
Cornershop
Idelwild
Girls Against Boys
The complete playlist is here

Great music that is bucking the current cock-rock trend of Linkin Park, System of a Down, Korn, etc. being offered by local Washington DC suck ass radio in the form of WHFS and it's "Most Played" list. (It's not Clear Channel, It's CBS, just as bad)

Then there's Radio Paradise.

Any /. geek would love this station merely for the technical expertise that Bill Goldsmith pulled off when he set this up.

Just boycott Clear Channel. Turn it off.....

You needn't follow the flock is you refuse to be part of it.

Well, it's been said, but I'll say it again. Maybe if the first single off of the new record wasn't titled We're All Made of Start then maybe people would buy it. Sounds to me like he's trying to make excuses to his label why his album isn't selling. I've actually heard a few other cuts from the new record on RadioParadise that made me want to buy the record in spite of the first single. Well, after this nonsense, no more.

GEEZ! As if it's not bad enough to have to pay through the nose for say, listening to Radio Paradise - now they want to charge for BOTH Bits AND Bytes!!!

... my wife is going to get really mad at me for all the CDs i buy after listening to Radio Paradise. i think this site has caused more havoc in my checking account than any other music-related stimulus since the advent of the CD player!

as several posters mentioned, we can't view this as a victory - not yet, probably not ever. the RAC has many fights ahead, and anyone who listens to internet radio should try to help: details here.

Believe it or not, some webcasters were actually smart enough to do that! Radio Paradise, at least, has a bit that loops every few minutes explaining what's going on and how to help. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

don't forget Radio Paradise

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

This is a subject I care about since I listen to a lot of internet radio. A short piece on the Radio Paradise web site discussing this issue: The Death of Web Radio? A fairly detailed (though obviously NOT unbiased) site dedicated to saving internet radio: Save Internet Radio -Phil

These guys also have an article on it...

As well as my favorite internet radio ...

I went over to the Clear Channel site, and the first things I noticed were pictures of the above two 'paragons of liberty', so (self-)censorship seems par for their course. I also noticed that they own SFX Entertainment, a major concert-venue owner and promoter. The corporate beast that is Clear Channel is as big as NBC.

After my stomach settled from the nausea, I reviewed some of the Salon articles on that corporation, and CC's self-censorship just *reeks* of hypocrisy! Their leader, Randy Michaels, is a one-time shock jock, and the offensiveness of RL and Dr. Laura just goes without saying. On the bright side, most of the banned songs mentioned here probably don't get played by CC anyway (too old, too independent, or not on the payola list).

Finally, I also looked at the CC stations in my area, and wasn't all that surprised to find that none of the five stations they own in town are among those I *ever* listen to. I personally find their content to be anywhere from inane to offensive to simply lame. (Truth be told, I'd happily listen to Radio Paradise if I could get it in my car. :-)

jeffk 18 sept 2001 -> Insert obligatory disclaimers, YMMV, etc. -
"I may make you feel, but I can't make you think." - J. Tull

Radio is not dead and it wont die anytime soon.

As previously ranted (sans link; how do you search the archived stuff, anyway?), I live in a city dominated by Clear Channel and Capital Cities radio properties. There's only one AAA station, and they're now aiming downmarket to catch the kiddies. The AAA genre, in general, has been the last bastion of progressive radio. But, as shown in this article on the Gavin site, AAA programmers are intentionally abandoning their progressive listeners to move their focus to the low end of their demographic. We're now referred to as "heritage listeners".

Of course, the net helps. But it complicates my life, as I need to record the Radio Paradise stream and burn it to CDR so I can have some decent music in my vehicle. (and, of course, I can't find a stream recorder that will just do 30-min chunks repeatedly)

I'm a realist, and I understand that radio has passed on. Doesn't mean I don't miss it.