Copyright Office Proposes Webcasting Regs

deadsquid writes: "Streaming to a desktop near you, the death knell of online radio stations. Continuing to pave the money trail the RIAA and others claim to be theirs and theirs alone, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel has released their ideas on what webcasters should pay to re-broadcast copyrighted material over the Internet. A good summary can be found at the Radio and Internet Newsletter, which provides an outline of what hoops net broadcasters must jump through, in addition to what they must pay. To say the rates are ridiculous is an understatement, and the amount of information required from the broadcaster to the copyright holder is ludicrous. The cost of bandwidth and delivery is already high enough, and this ruling, if upheld, kinda removes any hope of surmounting operating costs and continuing on. " Webcasters will have to report a great deal of information about their listeners according to the reporting requirements that the Copyright Office has proposed.

I thought I'd just summarize briefly for people who don't follow these issues:

Copyright law gives the record companies the right to prevent others from making copies of "their" music, except in certain cases where there is a "compulsory license" written into the law. In these cases, the record companies can't prevent anyone from using "their" music, but there is a mandatory fee that they must get paid. This "compulsory license" scheme was meant to keep the music industry from taking over the radio industry by simply refusing to license their music to certain radio stations (ones that didn't play ball, naturally). The U.S. Copyright Office sets the fees and revises them occasionally.

So the same idea was applied to webcasting music. In theory, this keeps the record companies from eliminating all-but-one or all-but-a-couple of the webcasters - anyone can webcast, you just have to pay the fee. However, if the record industry has too much influence over the process, they might try things like getting "compulsory license" fees set very high, or making sure that the record-keeping requirements are so onerous that it's impossible to comply with them.

In effect, this eliminates the "compulsory license" - because it's economically infeasible to comply with it. Webcasters can still seek individual licenses from the record companies, but this gets back to the original problem - the record companies have no obligation to make life easy for the nascent webcaster.

Comments

Civil Disobedience, anyone?

[xee]

I'm enjoying this opportunity to get a near-first post to voice my opinion about a topic i hold very near and dear to my heart. It's right there next to my American pride, and my severe freedom-loving disorder.

I think we should not be *discouraged* by this rediculous legislation. The RIAA will continue to trampel our rights to speech and expression as long as they are able to go after every single offender of these new laws. Once we achieve a critical mass greater than their lawyers can handle, they will no longer have the ability to force this legislation onto us.

This strategy of disregard for the American Way will stand as long as there are enough sheep out there buying every product the RIAA supplies them with.

The RIAA is amazingly better than Microsoft at manipulating the public. Not only is the RIAA trampeling our rights with this legislation, but they are raising our children to appreciate tasteless music. Once the youth of America grows up with no taste or preference for music, movies, or art, they will have no cause to stand up for their rights. There will be no reason to fight for the right to broadcast the music they like simply because they will have been trained to not like any particular music. There will be no impetus for creative expression once there is no example of creative expression.

The RIAA must be boycotted on a large scale. Do not buy your children the newest pop-craze. Do not pay royaltees for what is explicitly allowed in the copyright law. Do not succumb to the legislation that seeks to revoke and repeal the rights granted to us by the framers of the constitution.

Since everyone is on the terrorist bandwagon, i'd like to point something out: legislation of this sort (including the DMCA et al) is perhaps more anti-American than any terrorist organization could ever hope to be. While the terrorists are trying to fuck up our system from the outside, corporate interest is SUCCESSFULLY fucking it up from the inside.

THE RIAA IS CAUSING MORE HARM TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE THAN ANY TERRORIST ORGANIZATION COULD EVER DREAM TO.

This all begs the question: if Osama bin Laden is so rich, why doesn't he just hire a few lobbyists. It seems to work pretty well for the RIAA, MPAA, and others.

Good Riddance, radio free rant.

[Erris]

Fine. Let the RIAA price their crap right off of the web. The last thing I want competing with pictures of my three month old daughter is a no save copy of a Lars drum lick. This will, hopefully, leave the big five music publishers further in the past and encourage more people to sign with independent studios and publishers like MP3.com sought to be. Let them rule their litle airwave monopolies, let their listnership decline to zero and let them all perish, but keep that shit off the web.

Say goodbye to college webcasts..

[thumbtack]

This hits the college stations and non-profits the hardest. Where dwindling budgets and volunteer help is the norm, many will just say that's it and pull the plug....One college station I'm familiar with has an annual budget of $30,000 dollars, total. They struggle everyday just to get by, and saw the internet as a way they could save money over maintaining expensive transmitters.

Re:Great :^)

[Jeremi]

What we need is a system that rips off neither the musicians nor the fans, not one that promotes illegal activity...

Well, maybe... or perhaps we need to redefine what "ripping off" means wrt "intellectual property".

I assert that the advent of cheap PCs on the the Internet changes what "natural rights" people ought to have. I believe that rights can and sometimes should change in response to changes in technology -- the Internet's great gift to humanity is that it makes data sharing as easy as speaking; that advantage outweighs the content producer's disadvantage of having to find a new business model to adapt.

Specifically, people ought to be able to copy any data they want at any time, as long as they are not benefitting commercially from that copying. As for the artists, I think systems like OpenCulture or FairTunes may be the best answer to their problems.