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Copyright Office Publishes Final Webcasting Rates
Ghaleon writes: "The Copyright Office just released the final rates for webcasting. Looks like the rates are lower than the CARP recomendations, though I'm no webcaster so I'm not sure if these rates are good or not ..." nbrimhall points to a bit more at soma fm as well. Update: 06/20 21:54 GMT by M : See our last story for background information. The final rates are nothing to cheer about: most webcasters will not be able to afford them. Update: 06/21 03:13 GMT by T : An anonymous reader points out the continuing coverage at kurthanson.com, including reactions from Reps. Boucher and Inslee.
From the looks of it, the copyright office wants to make damn sure they get a chunk upfront instead of as a service grows. They don't seem to optimistic this area then, do they?
Rather surprized that Soma's complaining about being on equal footing with radio. Wasn't the whole basis of complaint about this thing that webcasters were being forced to pay MORE than radio transmissions?
While it is sad that they can't afford it, why do they deserve better rates than a traditional radio station?
Here is some lube. Its been nice knowing you. We will missing you.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
So either cough up 10s of thousands of dollars to pay for your theft of copyrights for the last 4 years, or take your hobby into the toilet. Doesn't matter that you only had, say, 10 listeners at a time or that the stuff you play doesn't belong to RIAA labels or that you had 0 income related to your webcasting. You still owe.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
The problem with this rate is that it's still based on the number of songs the station broadcasts. Most webcasters were hoping for a rate based on a percentage of their revenue. But, this was rejected.
So, even with this reduced rate, we're still going to see almost all webcasters go out of business. It's even going to be hard for the big businesses. I work for a large internet radio company, and I was just told by our exec in charge of working with the RIAA that our rates would probably go up about $500,000-600,000/yr from our current rate. He said one reason is because even if a user skips a song, it still counts as a play.
For more info, I highly suggest checking out RAIN (Radio And Internet Newsletter).
Well, the government has spoken, and the rates have been set, at a level high enough to kill webcasting as we know it. The RIAA must be cheering -- if they're not planning some sort of appeal to raise the rates even higher.
Personally, I think the RIAA has just finished the job of cutting its own throat.
Let's look at the facts: These rates apply to "commonly available" music, as a default royalty system. Webcasters are free to sign contracts with content performers and bypass these rates entirely. "But there's nothing good out there!" For now, perhaps.
Thing is, broadband is spreading like wildfire, as is the potential audience for webcasters, and more people will be edging to push their way into it. I'd expect to see underground webcasting stations pushing unknown bands grow common, and then some of them (both stations and bands) will grow increasingly popular. Meanwhile the bands pushed by the big labels (and big prices) will seem more and more stale.
The end result will be the decline and fall of the record companies, which will probably drag their signed artists down with them. Oh well.
You must work for the recording industry.
Exactly in what way are the large stations kept out by the smaller stations? What "room in terms of bandwidth" is missing now?? Are you trying to say that all the smaller webcasters are keeping out the big companies by buying up all the bandwidth??
I guess lack of alternatives is GOOD for me because then I don't have to worry about what I like and I can just take what I am given. No more thinking required! Lucky me!
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
You can speak all you want.
Taking someone else's speech and playing it back without permission is a different thing entirely.
Make your own damned music. Nothing is stopping you.
I agree with the other poster. The RIAA is cutting its own throat here.
But all players are free to negotiate any other terms, including lower terms, and including free for bands that want to get more play for their music and don't want the revenue.
This is a maximum because if they ask for more than the .07 or .02 cents, an internet radio station can just invoke the compulsory license and pay that lower amount.
Think this through again. The norm for copyright law is you can't perform somebody else's copyrighted work without permission. This ruling (common in the music industry but not elsewhere) says that you don't have to ask permission, you can just pay this fixed fee. If you go get permission you can arrange any fee both parties want. This ruling came down because people could not agree on fees.
In the end, this might mean that independent labels, which can now band together and declare lower fees for their music, dominate the airplay on internet radio stations. They might even declare free airplay for their stuff. This could mean independent labels begin to dominate the big labels on the internet.
Already projects like the Creative Commons are defining ways for works that want to allow free play to encode it right in the file.
Frankly, I don't think the government should be setting the price of music at all, however.
The very essense of civil disobedience is believing that the law is unjust, and that no one should follow it.
If you believe that persons other than you should follow the law you are breaking, that is not "civil disobedience". It is something else, called "breaking the law". Stop being silly.
and DANCE!
It's not NEARLY that simple.
/. links are to a major media site?
The recording industry DOES (currently) perform a service. They find people with talent and produce them. They fund the band to go into a studio and turn out polished music. Some people are able to turn out something just as polished but that is not going to be common.
Even suppose there was a MASSIVE swelling of excellent music from the masses, you think the recording industry would sit by and twiddle their thumbs?? As soon as people start to make a serious name for themselves, as soon as someone REALLY starts to hit it big, some label is going to sign them.
The people who make excellent music are PEOPLE. Most people need to work to live. If a record company says they will pay you to make music a musician will take it!
Again, the net has already seen this play out to some extent with writing. ANYONE can write anything they want and publish it on the net. A lot do. A lot of what is written is crap, a very small amount is very good. Hence karma. Still, how many of
Things will change. The RIAA & Co. are holding on to something that can not last. Technology will move forward and so will the Ludites in time. The only thing that is different about THESE Ludites is that they are at the top of the social order in stead of the bottom. So, instead of destroying machines they get laws passed. The important point is that Ludities NEVER WIN - technology is all about advantages. Those who use tools will always prosper in the end.
What do you say to the man that has nothing? Cast it away!!
from the copyright.gov article: However, the Librarian concluded that the CARP misinterpreted some aspects of the RIAA/Yahoo! agreement. One of the most significant errors by the CARP was its conclusion that the parties must have agreed that radio retransmissions have a tremendous positive promotional impact on sales of phonorecords - an impact that it did not find Internet-only transmissions have - and that this promotional impact explained the decision of RIAA and Yahoo! to set a higher rate for Internet-only transmissions. In fact, both the broadcasters (who benefitted from the CARP's conclusion regarding promotional value) and RIAA agree that there was no evidence in the record to support the conclusion that RIAA and Yahoo! considered and made adjustments for promotional value for radio retransmissions. The Librarian agreed with the Register of Copyrights that the CARP's conclusion about promotional value was arbitrary and was not supported by the evidence in the record, which provided no basis for concluding that radio retransmissions provide a promotional value that Internet-only transmissions do not provide.
RIAA is once again ignoring the fact that Internet radio transmissions provide MORE benefit to them by being able to reach MORE people at a lower cost. I've bought music from only hearing a single on a spinner.com broadcast--I'm a heck of a lot more likely to buy a CD if I can see who is playing than if I have to guess at who it might be.
Now that I've vented, can someone please explain to me how retroactive unspecified charges can be applied? If the IRS were to say, "We're going to tax you next year, but we're not going to decide how much those taxes are going to be for a couple of years and then you'll have to pony up the dough," I would think someone would take them to court and manage to get the charges wiped. Can someone with some real background in this explain this to me? Also, what am I missing with the label "Non-Commercial Broadcaster"? Does this mean that if you weren't making ANY money off of your broadcasts, you have to pay a lower rate? (Not that having to pay despite making no money doesn't suck...)
And why the heck was Yahoo selected to negotiate on this? Sure they've got a broadcast service, but they have money to blow, unlike Joe Schmo broadcasting out of their basement...
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Seriously. I've had a lifetime of listening to recordings, and get far too little live music in my life -- and I seek it out and go. This ruling applies to recordings. But... imagine what a grand thing it would be to have an internet feed from a jam studio where musicians came to make *live* music, not Muzak. Where musicians came to make the music live and breath, to make mistakes, to laugh, to improvise meandering, soaring solos -- to share the joy that is true, live music. Why can't we have this? Recordings are so sterile, so frozen in stone. So the same-every-time. Let's have some real music.
Here is what will happen:
Internet Radio continues to grow/develop, outside of the United States.
The number of US-based listeners continues to grow.
Non-US based Internet Radio stations begin to generate revenue.
US-based groups and industries begin to realize that they are missing out on a large stream of revenue/listerners, and begin to look for changes.
Sometime in the (near) future, new laws are passed that open up the United States market for Internet Radio.
So while I'm disgusted by the Copyright Office's decision, I have to say that I'm cautiously optimistic. Optimistic that sometime in the future people will realize what a big mistake this was.
I just ran the numbers, and if you're a non-commercial broadcaster (eg. most of us hobbiests) this works out to be $100.09 per listener-year (that is, one continuous listener for one year).
While it's a lot better than the proposed rate would have been ($184 per listener-year PLUS $1000 per year in ephemeral licenses [the recommendation was for $500 in E.L., but if you dig deeply you'll discover that an ephemeral license only permitted retaining a digital copy for a period of six months...]), it's still pretty terrible.
> They find people with talent and produce them.
> They fund the band to go into a studio and turn
> out polished music. Some people are able to turn
> out something just as polished but that is not
> going to be common.
I disagree. The cost of studio equipment has been dropping dramatically, and I'd expect the cost of studio time to go down as well. Distribution is a problem the net has solved; so has "airplay". I believe that indy will eventually be the way to go.
Besides, the recording industry exacts an enormous price for their services. See Courtney Love's speech on the subject for more details.
Well, duh... think of who owns CNN... AOL/Time/Warner also happen to own Atlantic, Rhino, Elektra, (of course) Warner Bros. Records, Maverick and Reprise; all of which are members of the RIAA.
Not a big surprise when it's all put in perspective, eh?
When I grow up, I want to have Christopher Walken hair.
Their website reads: "SomaFM: killed by the RIAA. June 20, 2002. With CARP royalties of $500 a DAY, SomaFM cannot continue broadcasting."
One important issue I haven't seen anyone mention is the dramatic difference in broadcasting models between traditional broadcast media and webcasting. If a radio station obtains an FCC license, their potential audience can number in the millions for no operating costs beyond the maintenance of that broadcasting license. That is, traditional radio broadcasting is limited only by antenna location and wattage. Webcasting, on the other hand, does not have to obtain a similar FCC license, but instead is drastically constrained by bandwidth, and furthermore, must pay for this (metered) bandwidth. Thus webcasters must effectively pay a (not insignificant) per-listener fee in order to broadcast. And this fee dictates that smaller webcasters with limited revenue are able only to broadcast to a severely limited audience (frequently only 8-16 listeners, for those webcasting from home). This is a number of orders of magnitude less than a similar station would have were they broadcasting over the airwaves, with little or no advertising revenue to subsidize their broadcast. And yet the RIAA wants these people to pay MORE than an equivalent radio station?
IMO a much better parallel for webcasting is a DJ playing music in a dance club rather than a radio station broadcast. There is a limited audience, no revenue, and webcasting is a subscription-based service very similar to a person entering a dance club. That is, at any time, a webcaster can retrieve a list of exactly who is listening to their webcast. Radio stations cannot make a similar claim.
The compulsory license is the maximum that will need to be paid. The real amount can be anything from zero up to it - if the broadcasters and labels properly negotiate it.
sulli
RTFJ.