Webcasters Have To Pay

penguinradio writes "News.com is reporting that the Copyright office is going to require webcasters to pay fees for the songs they choose to play over the net. This has been a grey area of law for some time, but now it seems that this decision will move the case into the courts (where both sides were hesitant to enter for fear of losing the case)." Basically, this means that radio stations have to be pay an additional fee to broadcast over the Internet, as well as their current payment for "on-air" broadcasting.

Comments

Streaming Companies

[sys$manager]

I used to work for a streaming provider that streamed both radio stations and their own in house stations, and I always wondered why real radio stations had to pay every time they played a song and the streaming providers didn't. That looked like an advantage to the streaming companies. Now they are trying to level the playing field. Even with the advantages of not paying the royalties the streaming companies couldn't stay alive though.

Re:So much for legal Pirate radio...

[squiggleslash]

I see it as more reasonable than you suggest. "Legal Pirate" is, of course, a contradiction in terms. What isn't is the notion that anybody ought to be able to create their own "radio" station. Up until now, there has been no legal framework to do so.

The limitations until recently were twofold. Up until the popularisation of the Internet, there was no legal way of broadcasting without Government permission - permission that generally took the form of buying a small slice of a limited resource in a particular area. That restriction has been swept away by the Internet (kindof, still hard to broadcast to somebody's car stereo at the moment, but with Satellite IP, maybe that will change in time.)

The other is the lack of a legal way of making use of third party content. Until this case, you would have to negotiate directly with every third party content supplier (ie artist/agent/publisher, etc), or else generate the whole of the content of your station yourself.

Now this is changing. The copyright office is implying, though through a method that might at first seem to be negative to the status quo, that it's going to drop the latter restriction. Henceforth there will be a mechanism by which you can pay for third party content to play on your "radio" station.

It's not as great, to a publisher, as getting it for free, but getting it for free was never legal to begin with. The major issue now is for webcasters to find financial models that allow them to pay those funds - something which may, at first, seem to be yet another hassle, but given the fact that a good broadband connection capable of hosting webcasting services, already puts a price on webcasting capabilities, anyone who wants to do this is going to have to work out a source of funding anyway.

Across the Internet, web banners and micropayment services such as the infamous adult check systems, are already being used to make credible economic models available to people who want to put out their own sites. Perhaps ultimately, the same types of resource will be made available to people who want to run their own, private, amateur broadcasting services. One can but hope.
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some clarification

[spatula]

I work for a college radio station that also broadcasts on the Internet, so I've been watching this area closely. Radio stations already pay royalties to the songwriters, mostly through the two organizations ASCAP and BMI. But they do not have to pay royalties to the performers of the music, whose copyright is usually held by a record label. Live broadcast is considered a performance itself, so the people who performed on the recording don't get paid for our live "performance" of their music.

Now, with Internet broadcast we are still required to pay fees to the songwriters through ASCAP and BMI. But what is at dispute here is whether we now have to pay fees to the record labels as well. Of course, the RIAA says we should pay. They are trying desparately to convince Congress that Internet broadcast is not the same as airwave broadcast, since it is essentially "copying" digital data from one computer to another. NAB, the national association of broadcasters, is the most outspoken group against this legislation, unsurprisingly. Their stance is that Internet radio should fall under the same laws as broadcast radio.

The issue is not as black and white as both sides claim. What if I set up a server on the Internet to stream my favorite mp3's to all my friends, where they can save them on their computers. If I claim I am just an "Internet radio" station, then I have used a loophole to get around my blatant copyright infringement. I don't have a good answer for what should be done in cases like that. Comments?

Well, do you hear ads on webcast radio?

[typical geek]

If you do, someone's paying the radio station to play the ads.

Teh radio station is making money off the webcast, so obviously, the recording industry will want their share, too.

Of course, when you listen to a webcast from 2000 miles away, most ads aren't very useful. Gee, free hot dogs for the kiddies at a used car lot, I only have to drive 2000 miles to get them.

I like the idea

[tcd004]

of the radio stations having to pay a fee everytime they subject a backstreet boys song on the public.

tcd004
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