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I hope you'll not only share a link to where your music can be found but you'll keep your sensibilities about music and the RIAA when talking to radio stations. I work at a community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM) which plays a great deal of music licensed by the RIAA. Hardly what I'd call alternative, but mine isn't the only opinion in the place.

Recently we had a light discussion about what it would take to do webstreaming. For those of you who don't know, the RIAA licenses tracks of their clients and the terms of the license are rather vague and somewhat hard to shift to if one is used to being able to broadcast almost anything.

WORT recently announced a new and improved webcast. Their announcement is interesting because it starts by lying claiming that they'll webcast "all of its programming!" (see page 13 of the PDF newsletter). When you read further you see that WORT plans to comply with RIAA licensing restrictions by not webcasting some of its programming (presumably either shows or tracks that can't be webcast at that moment). Like I said, it's not easy to webcast if you insist on doing what you can to avoid losing a copyright infringement lawsuit while playing RIAA-licensed stuff. If you've grown used to the over-the-air rules, which don't restrict you in the way RIAA's webcasting restrictions do, you've got a tough row to hoe. The RIAA's online restrictions say things such as you can't play the same featured artist more than 4 times in a 3-hour period, nor can you play more than 3 tracks from the same CD/tape/record in a 3-hour period.

I was curious how much adjustment WEFT would have to make to take on webcasting RIAA tracks. So I looked at some of WEFT's playlists and compared them to RIAA webcasting restrictions. Suffice to say, WEFTies don't yet realize how many shows they'll have to change. I forsee much unpleasant discussion about this topic as we wrestle with exchanging increased listenership for playlist freedom and the hassles that go along with assembling an RIAA-compliant playlist.

/.ers will read this and think that this is a natural application for a database. And if you're thinking this way, you're right but there's more to it than that. WEFT has roughly 40,000 CDs in its library and lots of CDs coming in every week. Finding the financing for the hardware to host the database on alone is a daunting task, finding the volunteer commitment needed to make the database workable for everyone (not just the techies) is another tall order. I'm up for it, but I know a lot more about writing software than I do about writing grant requests, and I estimate we'll need many thousands of dollars to do this in a way that won't fall over when the power dies or a couple of hard drives go bad.

Still other /.ers might think differently and conclude that we should just stop playing RIAA tracks, or WEFT should severly cut down on the RIAA tracks we play. Again, I'm up for that—I host a public-affairs program called "Digital Citizen" every other Wednesday from 8-10PM where I play only stuff my listeners can share. I focus on copyright law, patent law, and Free Software (as in the Free Software movement) issues. The only RIAA licensed tracks I play are fair-use snippets, so these webcasting rules don't apply to me. Other public-affairs shows (like News from Neptune) don't play RIAA tracks at all. The majority of shows on WEFT are music shows and it remains to be seen how receptive they will be to giving up 90% or more of what's in WEFT's library.

So now you're slightly more familiar with the restrictions from the radio end of things, even on community radio which is ostensibly more accessible to the public and less likely to play the mainstream RIAA-licensed stuff you can hear everywhere else.

Throughout the question, we can see that letting people do things which can be shown to be unethical, costly, and dismissive of freedoms we ought to cherish (such as freedom of speech) are considered "harangu[ing]" or "obnoxious", and yet nothing proprietors do is framed in that way.

I hope this doesn't mean that it's okay for them to deny me the freedom to share and modify. I hope this isn't yet another attempt to frame the debate so that the onus of responsibility is on me to justify myself without requiring business to justify treating me this way. Sharing and modifying is how computing worked since long before the free software community began, proprietary software is actually rather new, but that zeitgeist has been lost in large part. If it weren't for the free software community, we wouldn't have wonderful things like GNU/Linux systems.

I don't teach people about open source because that movement was built to cater primarily to business, and I'm interested in speaking to all computer users, not just businesses. I teach people about software freedom and related matters on my radio talk show (Digital Citizen, every other Wednesday on WEFT 90.1 FM from 8-10p) and I take calls. If you're in the Champaign, IL area then, I invite you to tune in and join the discussion. I don't think of open source as an enemy, I think of open source as a newer spin-off that loses a great deal of power in its argument by dropping any talk about freedom. One practical freedom that movement doesn't push for is private derivatives (making a copy of a program's source code, changing it to meet one's needs, and using it privately without telling anyone else it exists), something I've used a lot to solve my own computing problems.

I do this work for my radio show because I take threats including DRM, software patents, and so-called "trusted computing" (which the FSF refers to as "treacherous computing") seriously. The mainstream media never discusses these issues from the user's point of view, if they discuss them at all. Their focus invariably encourages the user to take the business perspective and ignore what these ideas mean for them. I think these topics deserve serious inquiry and challenge. Software freedom addresses these issues head-on and provides a viable path for us to be able to compete on the quality of the good or service provided, respecting the idea that what separates us from a dog-eat-dog jungle is working together and helping each other when we need help.

I recommend downloading talk shows that feature interesting guests and conversation. Two such shows are on my local community radio station, News from Neptune and Mediageek. Episodes of both are available are available online in a variety of formats including Ogg Vorbis format (no patent restrictions, no DRM, it's just a regular file) and they licensed to share. When I get a domain name, I will add episodes of my show Digital Citizen to that list.

Check out News from Neptune -- an hour-long weekly news and commentary show from WEFT 90.1 FM. The News from Neptune site is being worked on (one of the co-host bios has not yet been written) but there are shows up under a Creative Commons license in DRM-free Ogg Vorbis and Speex format (current show in Ogg Vorbis, archive shows in Speex). Download, share, and enjoy. I helped put the show online and I host another show at the same station.

Microsoft lies by omission the same way Bill Gates did when he recently visited the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign--don't mention software freedom, anytime someone mentions "free software" only talk about price (where proprietary software often fails to compete). I certainly appreciate the opportunity to inspect, share, and modify software to suit my needs. Whether I take advantage of it is up to me. I don't have that option with proprietary software. When you focus on software freedom, you focus on something software proprietors cannot, by definition, compete with.

The Free Software Society at UIUC is currently working to arrange a response talk where issues of software freedom can be addressed. I host "Digital Citizen" on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday; two weeks ago I had Brad Kuhn, executive director of the FSF, and Chris Foster, founder of the Free Software Society, on my show to respond to Bill Gates' speech in which he took a question from someone asking about the Linux kernal. When I arrange for some web hosting, I'll post a copy of the show and other episodes of the show under a Creative Commons license.

Even on technical features, Microsoft fails to point out that their programs run on all the operating systems (which makes their "networked, highly collaborative world" claim hard to swallow unless you have committed yourself to always using Microsoft Windows for all things). I'm well aware that over 90% of the world's PCs run Microsoft Windows, but as more people hear about Microsoft's illegalities and lenient treatment by the world's governments, as well as all the viruses and trojan horses that spread so quickly via Microsoft programs, I think this will change.

While you raise good points about what happens in the absence of competition, and that the crime happened before the first copy of the CD was purchased, I think the parent poster had a good point too. The parent poster should not be chided for observing that people could have rejected these CDs in the first place.

People need to be introduced to musicians that don't sign with RIAA-affiliated labels. The public needs to hear about independant distributors that treat the public like partners, not criminals. I host a public affairs show called "Digital Citizen" on community radio (WEFT 90.1 FM) every other Wednesday 8-10p and I talk about issues including copyright matters. If you're near Champaign, Illinois I invite you to tune in. I have interviewed musicians and distributors that work with the public to bring us good music. I also make sure that the talks and music I play on the show can all be recorded and shared verbatim (at the least). I have a huge library of music to draw from at WEFT, but almost all of it cannot be shared in the way I want my show to be shared, so I don't air any of that music on my show.

Just as these RIAA-affiliated corporations make a choice to screw the public, we can choose not to be taken. But it takes a great deal of education to get the ball rolling. It's not impossible, it just requires time and work.

I volunteer at a community radio station (WEFT 90.1 FM) and I host "Digital Citizen", a bi-weekly show (Wednesdays 8-10p) that talks focuses on Free Software, copyright and patent issues, and related topics. I'd be happy to air interesting speeches or discussions from the Bangalore event. Unfortunately I can't make it to Bangalore to record the events myself, but if anyone has Ogg Vorbis files to share, that would be great.

Thanks in advance.

I concur. I wish more people understood the value of freedom (in its own terms and in terms of its practical impact--getting a new version of the Linux kernal and still be able to use the driver, being able to share the code with your friends and neighbors without legal problems, being able to inspect the code so you can be sure it's not doing anything bad) and demanded that from vendors.

I'm happy to work with commercial interests that help the Free Software community, and I'm happy to recommend them on-air too (I'm host of "Digital Citizen"--alternate Wednesdays, 8-10 PM).

I think we need to somehow get "one of us" on one of these news programs to help "the masses" see that there is really an important battle coming in the very, very near future.

I do this every other week albeit on community radio, not television. I host a show called Digital Citizen on WEFT 90.1 FM every other Wednesday night from 8-10p. If you happen to be in the Champaign, IL area I invite you to tune in. When I get the means, I plan to record the show and make it available somewhere online for download, streaming, and sharing.