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Copyright Office Rejects CARP Recommendations
dave-fu writes "This just in: webcasters can breathe a sigh of relief as common sense and good taste has won out over stuffed suits and greased pockets--CARP has been rejected. If you weren't aware of it, CARP would have imposed exorbitant fees on webcasters, effectively killing webcasting radiostations, or at least preventing them from playing all (American) copyrighted music." See our previous story, or saveinternetradio.org, or read through the Copyright Office page linked above for background information. I wouldn't rejoice just yet - while webcasters argued that the proposed rates were way too high, the RIAA argued that they were way too low. There will still be royalty rates set by the Copyright Office, and the final rates may not be anything to cheer about.
This is good, but like the article said, I think we need to continue campaigning to the LOC so that the royalty rates they DO set are reasonable. Nothing could kill off Internet radio like deathly royalties.
/gleffler
Librarians are the true modern heros. Go hug one today.
A well-crafted lie appears unquestionable - Dama Mahaleo
Hopefully common sense will be used when setting rates. Internet broadcast requires more costs (in theory) then regular radio broadcasts.
With regular radio broadcasts, the number of listeners has no impact on your ability to deliver content (in this case, music). With internet broadcasts, the more users you have, you need to have more bandwidth to be able to serve them content at the same data rate. In some (most?) cases more bandwidth leads to more expenditure of $$$.
If the other expenses of internet radio stations are to be considered in setting of these royalty rates (which I think is BS in the first place, the RIAA is too damn greedy) I should hope they will use common sense and set them lower.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
The requirements under CARP
A) The name of the service
B) The channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station id)
C) The type of program (Archived/Looped/Live)
D) Date of Transmission
E) Time of Transmission
F) Time zone of origination of Transmission
G) Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program
H) Duration of transmission (to nearest second)
I) Sound Recording Title
J) The ISRC code of the recording
K) The release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track
L) Featured recording artist
M) Retail album title
N) The recording Label
O) The UPC code of the retail album
P) The catalog number
Q) The copyright owner information
R) The musical genre of the channel or program (station format)
And a listener's log listing:
1) The name of the service or entity
2) The channel or program
3) the date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone)
4) the date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone)
5) The time zone where the signal was received (user)
6) Unique User identifier
7) The country in which the user received the transmissions
This is an air of relief for our college radiostation, because for a long time Internet has been our primary broadcasting medium. We were getting ready to find ways to recover our outreach, if our Internet outlet was cut off by CARP's rates.
We don't get too wide of a listening audience (compared to your average commercial webcaster), but it's still important that Internet maintains a wide variety of webcasters.
Note the article says that the final decision is to be made on June 20, so it's not over yet. We have put up flyers and a notice on our web page about the rates, but it's been difficult to raise awareness to this issue: most people just don't care.
(sorry, anon at work..)
Isn't the use of copyrighted works a matter of getting permission from the rights holder? Can't the rights holder insist on whatever royalty payment system he feels is appropriate?
It may not be very nice, but if the RIAA wants to keep its music from being webcast, I don't see why the government should stop them. If they want to charge royalty rates that effectively do the same thing, that's their bad business decision.
So why is the Copyright Office involved?
One thing that lots of the places seemed to bitch about was the tracking of the listeners. Now, I know that they wanted it to be retroactive to the DMCA and that's just stupid, but from say now on, what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.
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If the United States makes it illegal/expensivie to operate an internet radio station, the radio station can simply move its servers to another location (lets say Canada or UK) where the regulation doesn't exist (yet). There is no visible effect on the service to the user, and the American government successfully alienates another new technology. In the mean time other contries will benefit from the short-sightedness of another.
In the end, you cannot continue to support an outmoded business model with legislation and regulation (if this worked in the past it certainly won't work in a "Global Economy").
The CARP fees were totally outrageious. Their purpose was (or, is) to destroy Internet radio. This would leave the major labels with virtually no competition to their radio monopoly.As an independent artist, it's good to hear at least some occasional good news.
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
while webcasters argued that the proposed rates were way too high, the RIAA argued that they were way too low.
That made something click, here.
It seems to me that, rather than getting the producer and consumer together to negotiate a fair-market price, the RIAA lobbied to get the government to impose a price.
For how long has the music economy been socialist? Is our intolerance of the RIAA limited to its bullying and selfishness, or can it be extended to this attempt to corrupt the freedom of commerce itself?
--Blair
Diana Rehm covered this yesterday. There's an audio link here
Webcasters want the same rates as normal broadcasters. That is, they pay a percentage of gross sales.
So, if an Internet radio station has sales of zero, then they pay zero. If they have gross sales of a million bucks, then they pay the same fee as broadcasters that have gross sales of 5 million dollars.
This is definitely good news. At least it proves that the copyright office won't be easily swayed by the RIAA's demands. As far as the whole independent music thing goes, i believe it's a very good thing for independent music.. in the longrun that is. The bad thing is that if the approved rates are outrageous, the only stations that will be able to afford them are the ones backed by big companies such as broadcast.com and spinner.. etc. which is pretty much the same thing that happened to FM radio with monsters like clearchannel buying out all the small stations. They're the reason why there's 5 cookie-cutter station formats around the country. The good thing is that maybe this is a wake-up call to artists/labels and independent stations/media. Maybe it's finally time to move away from cookie-cutter programming and pay attention to independent labels and artists.. We've already made a big move with the Internet by overcoming the RIAA's monopoly with distributors, and college/internet stations have always done it to a certain extent.. True, at first listeners might not pay attention to it. But give it a few years.. This is only the beginning.
kurthanson.com is the homepage for the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN), a fine spot for up-to-date information on what's going on in the world of webcasting.
Found both of these links at WFMU, aka numero uno webcasting radio station in the world.
Gotta love the fact that the RIAA wants to see that webcasters pay fees on top of the ASCAP/BMI fees that "real" radio stations do without getting any of the payola.
At any rate, it'll be interesting to see what the Librarian of Congress does in the next 30 days.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
As an aside, whatever happened to the multicast backbone? I seem to recall that "they" were working on some kind of an IP-level packet redistribution service (my words) that would enable an application to tell its closest router "hey, I wanna listen to 244.123.45.6", and it'd then ask it's upstream router the same thing, etc., until it was able to get a copy of the stream routed to the requesting client.
Or something remotely like that.
Anyway, it seemed like a terrific idea, 'cause the content provider wouldn't have to server a thousand different, unique streams, all with the same content -- it'd just send a single stream to an MBone address, and anyone who wanted to receive it could ask for it.
I just did a quick check on it, and only found 6-year-old FAQs and such. Has it died? Has it been overcome by events with IPv6?
I ask 'cause it occurred to me that any webcaster broadcasting on mbone wouldn't be *able* to tell how many people were listening. A sort of end-run around some of CARP, as it were...
The difference is that when radio was getting started in the music playing business congress decided that it was a promotion tool for the record industry and exempted radio from paying royalties to the record labels.
However now that the record industry has it's lobbying worked out congress suddenly realised that internet radio is really about stealing from the record industry instead of promotion.
I read the Librarian of Congress's order, and it doesn't say WHY the CARP recommendation was rejected. Nor could I find a press release explaining the decision, although there might be one forthcoming.
You're all assuming that the LoC wants Internet radio to be free, or cheaper than CARP wanted, but that might not be the case! Maybe the LoC wants HIGHER royalty rates!
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I will, but maybe that's just because my fiancée just got accepted into a masters of library science program.
"It may not be very nice, but if the RIAA wants to keep its music from being webcast, I don't see why the government should stop them"
It may not be very nice, but if I want to copy a friend's CD, I don't see why the government should stop me.
You see, Copyright isn't a natural right, it is done by legislative fiat. Thus, part of what you "give up" for copyright and DMCA protection is the government get to tell you how you can apply those right.
If you don't like it, then don't apply for the copyright. "Oh dear" you say, "Then I have no protection". Well yes, that's the point. If you want the FBI to be your copyright militia, then you have to play by their rules.
Remember, there is no RIGHT to a copyright.
Here is a Newsbytes story on the ruling. A little bit more hard-news information about the decision and its likely impact.
modern choral music...
The nice thing about internet radio is the ability to use something like StreamRipper and save every song, properly named and tagged, as a .mp3 file.
I've been doing a lot of this recently as it appeared internet radio was perhaps about to end and I wanted to snatch up a bunch of the music while I still had the chance.
I'm on a high speed connection, so last week for a couple days I was actually running 5 instances of StreamRipper at once, each connected to a different "radio station". Within just a couple work days I had snagged multiple gigabytes of 128kbit mp3 files.
I think what I've just described is why the RIAA and such are making such a fuss.
I started listening to 3wk.com at work recently for the hell of it and was surprised to find out how different it was. First of all, unlike FM, there are no noisy stretches of cheesy LOUD and painful commercials from local businesses like tire salesmen and ripoff dating services. Once in a while a guy with a creepy voice comes on and gives a little spiel about the RIAA and how you should write your Senator, but that's it. And instead of hearing the same mass marketed tiny selection of force-fed boy band / Britney Spears garbage that every FM station pummels you with over and over again, I didn't recognize many of the songs at all. I think it is a mixture of RIAA and non-RIAA artists. Some of it was crap. But a few songs were were really good, enough that I wrote down the artist/album/song title that the site displays while each song is playing. For about half of them, you don't even need a spyware-riddled p2p client to find MP3s- just use Google to find the band's web site and download MP3s right from there completely legally. You can hear what each track on their album sounds like before you decide whether or not to buy it.
You would be surprised how many decent artists never get picked up by the cartel.
You may have read today that the Librarian of Congress, based upon the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, issued an Order rejecting the Panel's determination proposing rates and terms for these licenses. In such cases, the law provides that the Librarian shall issue his final determination within 30 days of his decision to reject the Panel's proposed rates and terms. The final determination is due on June 20, 2002.
We hope this means that the Librarian has realized that not all current parties were properly represented at the CARP hearings, and the proposed rates and reporting requirements were unreasonable and did not represent a market rate.
Webcasters want a royalty rate that is fair and equitable to all sides - a rate based on revenues, in the 3% range, much like the royalties paid to the composers of the songs now through ASCAP and BMI. The rejected proposal would have killed the market by wiping out most if not all of the industry.
Webcasters also want reduced reporting requirements - Song Name, Artist, Album and Label where available. Not the 25 or so data points asked for by the RIAA.
We do not know what will happen next. This ruling may even mean that another CARP hearing will be held, this time we hope it will be more accessible to small internet broadcasters. (Previous CARPs required all participants to share the costs associated with it, which came out to about $300,000 for each participant.)
But internet broadcasters are happy that we can stay on the air for another 30 days. If the decision went the other way, many stations would have started shutting down this week.
i'm usually more aware of this type of legislation but was caught off guard by this. So I did some digging at RIAA's site (better to know your enemy) and found this spin control document.
My favorite quote:
In recent weeks, the CARP rates have become the subject of an intense misinformation and propaganda campaign (so called "grassroots" but really ginned up by sophisticated lobbyists in D.C.)
nahhh it's not grass roots... it's ginned up by sophisticated lobbyists!
Hil Rosenator is smoking some crack if she expects people to really believe this but it is interesting. Whom did they have in mind?
Well later on in the document they specifically name MTV, Microsoft, AOL/TW. With the exception of MTV (who's parent company may have some quarrels with RIAA) it seems like technology vs. copyright all over again. I just wish the tech companies would realize they are fighting this together and publicly unify against RIAA and other media hordes (whores?) who have clearly put aside internal bickering to concentrate on world domination through Project "Nickle and Dime" the fuck out of everyone.
It is clear to me that any and all delay in the process helps the RIAA members and harms the webcasters for two reasons: During the three-and-a-half (so far) years wait for the price of music to be set, it has been impossible for a webcaster to make a real business plan, to create a spreadsheet that describes their business in numbers, to pitch potential investors, or to sign any serious contracts with advertisers or other funders, thus crippling the fledgling industry. On the other hand, the record industry needs lots of time to get their act together to move in with their own outfits.
As a webcater, I am coming to realize that unlike most of the people in broadcasting, I am a BUYER and not a freeloader. I am going to demand some respect from any label trying to get on my station. Tribute even.
I am afraid that the RIAA is going to price their member's works out of the market. If I can buy gas at one station for $1.50 or go next door and pay $15.00, where do you think I will tend to pull in to fill up?
Today I was on Paul Allen's TechTV when the statement from the Librarian of Congress came out. I deleted a RIAA member property song from the play rotation on my station, on camera, and they aired it! Click Click "Well, no royalties for Lowen and Navarro, no promotion, no exposure, no airplay, no CD sales. Too bad. Too expensive."