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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.
Bye-bye Groove Salad, it's been nice knowing you!
sulli
RTFJ.
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?
Tag's Trance Trip, one of my favorite internet radio stations of all time, just went down.
We'll probably see a lot more stations go down. Underground internet radio and offshore stations will be all that's left.
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!
It ain't karma whoring if you're AC:
(comment: the author thinks this is a victory for webcasters - he must listen to Clear Channel and think it's excellent)
Rates set for royalties on Internet music broadcasts
DAVID HO, Associated Press Writer Thursday, June 20, 2002
(06-20) 14:42 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
In a victory for Internet music broadcasters, the government on Thursday decided that songs delivered online will be charged royalty fees at a rate that is half of what was originally proposed by an arbitration panel.
Webcasters will be charged at a rate that amounts to 70 cents per song for each one thousand listeners, the U.S. Copyright Office announced on its Web site.
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who oversees the Copyright Office, found that the original proposal that set a higher rate for Internet-only programs than the radio rate "was arbitrary and not supported by the record of evidence," said spokeswoman Jill Brett.
In May, Billington rejected a government panel's rate proposal -- up to $1.40 per song heard by one thousand listeners. That was double the rate for broadcasts sent out simultaneously on radio and the Internet.
"It's good news for a number of Internet webcasters who will now likely be able to stay on the air," P.J. McNealy, research director with the analyst firm, GartnerG2.
Opponents to Thursday's ruling can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit within 30 days. The court could modify or set aside the decision if it finds the ruling was highly unreasonable.
Internet radio, either simulcasts of traditional over-the-air radio or Internet-only stations streamed through the Internet to computers, is becoming more popular as people get high-speed connections at home.
Webcasters said the rates initially proposed were too high and would cost larger Internet radio broadcasters hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, more than they get from advertising or listener contributions. Many webcasters said the fees, which would be retroactive to 1998, would force them to shut down.
The record industry had sought higher royalties, saying more was needed to compensate artists and music labels for using their songs.
Webcasters, as well as over-the-air radio stations, already pay composers and music publishers royalties for the music they play, based typically on a percentage of their revenues.
But traditional radio broadcasters have been exempt from paying the royalties for each song played -- the standard that is now being applied to webcasters. Broadcasters successfully argued before lawmakers that they already were promoting the music.
After the recording industry failed to impose those new royalties on traditional broadcasters, the industry turned to webcasters -- and a 1998 law granted the industry its wish.
The RIAA in this article, blasted the decision as too low
guess they just cant accept that a few webcasters might be able to come up with business model that actually allows them to survive.
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
this ruling includes a retroactive charge going back to October 28, 1998 that is due in full by October 20, 2002. so if you were webcasting or simulcasting since 1998 (or before) you OWE for 4 years IMMEDIATELY!
since the rates are relatively unchanged (completely unchanged for non-commercial), you are out of business because you racked up a debt unknowingly for those 4 years.
if you are a non-commercial station, college or community, you may have to shutdown both castings and give up.
Certified Black Helicopter Pilot *** Unwitting Dupe of One World Gov'ment
Considering how corrupt the current broadcast radio industry is, I'm surprised that online broadcasters are able to license any song to broadcast, whenever they want. With conventional radio, stations play what the labels pay them to play. I can really see these new guidelines thinning out the more amateurish broadcasters, and leaving the more polished, better set-up ones intact. Personally, I wouldn't mind having some sort of radio subscription service for my favourite anime stations...
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
And heres why: only unsigned bands will be able to get on U.S. net radio stations. Seriously, fark the RIAA. The other good news is all the streams with copyrighted music will be overseas, either hosted there or run by foreigners, it doesnt really matter. Either way more people will be looking overseas to give the finger to the U.S.
This really does make me sad, though. Hopefully this will jumpstart artists to move to more independent labels.
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.
I've listened to the occasional Net music stream, but never served one. But I wonder -- how are they going to know if you've run a Net music service on your personal connection? Business DSL? etc.? It seems like this is a "don't ask, don't tell" situation.
i am a soviet space shuttle
It is sad that stations like Digitally Imported are quite possibly going to become an endangered species. They brought me music I'd never have encountered on FM radio, or most likely have been lucky enough to find on file sharing services. However, many public radio stations that offer streaming audio will remain, such as WQXR FM will likely remain, as they already pay royalties. So it is at least almost guaranteed that there will be some free, non-commercial radio in the internet's future. Now if only we could get NPR to pony up the cash for a few public, all-trance stations :-)
I just paid somafm money last week. Not that I regret it, they are a terrific station that plays music I wouldn't hear elsewhere.
It just doesn't make any sense to have the internet, which creates a worldwide marketplace and communications medium, limited by the same old forces that want to create artificial economies of scarcity because they can't see past their "today's spreadsheet," prejudged view of the world. But they're succeeding, and they'll continue to dominate what we can see and do. It may create stability in some people's minds, but it's not natural.
I've been trying to work this one out - does this apply to EVERY webcasting station, or only those broadcasting music that the RIAA has its fingers in? Will stations that only play unamerican music survive? (pun intended)
The difference between Internet radio and traditional radio is as the difference between just about anything on the Internet and the traditional way: barrier to entry. The costs of starting up a traditional radio startion fall into the millions and millions of dollars. The cost of starting an Internet radio startion? Well, it depends on the number of listners you want to start with (bandwith usage) but could start being as little as a few hundred a month for a commercial job, or even less if you can run one off a cable modem.
This new per-performance rate, while low and on-par with traditional radio, effectivly kills all the small, independant internet radio startions out there. Sure, huge commerical ones will continue unemcumbered, but the small time ones that played all that hard-to-fnd music will now be gone, unable to pay these fees. In other words, big money has won out again, and the small independant radio station is one again a thing of the past.
Internet radio is different than regular radio in that you know exactly how many listeners you have. It seems the rates are per song.. and they're the same for commercial and non-commercial..
And existing radio stations will pay more to replay their broadcasts too.
You Knew this was comming, most cd's tell you public performance is prohibited, now webcasting is officially public performance
Remixes: I'm a big fan of video game remixes, for instance. In cases like those, there's next to no legal issues involved, and there should be no charge. Similarly though, would other types of remixes be immune, even if they extensively used clips from existing songs?
Unusual selections: If a radio station had, for instance, old audio commercials, which although possibly copywritten, would generally raise no major issues over lost income for the owners, would those follow similar charges? How about theme songs, or approved short song clips?
On a related note, would station creators be responsible for metering just what was being played at all times, and to how many people? The sheer processor use and disk space required to keep such a log alone would bankrupt most online radio stations, I'd think.
Ryan Fenton
Reposted from digitally imported's forums
I don't know how it will affect DI, but if anyone was listening to Tag's Trance Trip, he shut off just before 3pm Pacific Time.
He was in tears thanking everyone.
Last song on the air was "Days go by" by Dirty Vegas
The anarchy of the net can prevail though. As streams drop off the air (every shoutcast stream may be affected), we must trade the files via FTP and P2P networks if we are to stop the music cartels. Blank cds are cheap, hand out cds full of mp3s with information about what has been done to our beloved streams.
As the streams are shut off, open up the archives and distribute them. Show them how much worse it will get when they block off one avenue of our expression.
Our culture should not be locked away from us and sold back to us.
------------------
The ideas contained herein are free to republish by anyone not affiliated in any way shape or form with the RIAA and MPAA
`/\/\
(^.^)
(")(")
not quite an analog pussy, just a cat that plays with vinyl
... hasn't got much to do with broadcasting, but do as most shipping companies has done: flag out.
Look a monkey!
To borrow a paraphrase from the Good Doctor (Asimov), that is much like unto the excrement of the male bovine. The larger stations that can afford the fees (and are those insane record keeping requirements still in place?) will be the ones that churn out the same mind-numbing bilge that commercial radio already provides.
Sigh. It was great while it lasted...
It's time for civil disobedience.
It's time for someone to setup a streaming radio app that works similar to P2P. Something that can't be shut down.
This is total bullshit. Commercial stations don't pay $500 per day. Why should Somafm?
I know the guy running Soma watches Slashdot. What can we do to help, short of giving in and paying these mobsters? I'll do what I can for you, but I'm not sure what to do aside from continuing to sign online petitions and send letters. I sent one to my rep in congress on this subject. Received a worthless form letter in reply that refused to take a position on either side. The punk.
I have 1Mbps of upstream bandwidth. Maybe it's time to put my private 15GB MP3 collection up on the various P2P networks? So far, I don't let anyone but my family access it, but I'm thinking it's time to reconsider...
I know at least some of you bastards in the industry are reading this. Get a clue: The public won't stand for this greed. Swapping music on the Internet is only going to increase because of this. You people need to change your attitude, and fast - you can't prosecute us all.
-Ryan, with the unoriginal sig
You Knew this was comming, most cd's tell you public performance is prohibited, now webcasting is officially public performance
Believe it or not internet radio stations pay licensing fee's just like regular radio.
Hacker Media
Brockman: [on air] And as my final newscast draws to a close, I'm reminded of a few of the events that brought me closer to you: the collapse of the Soviet Union, premium ice cream price wars, dogs that were mistakenly issued major credit cards, and others who weren't so lucky. And so, farewell. Uh, and don't forget to look for my new column in PC World magazine.
Sideshow Bob: Success! They're giving in. Blast! I should've made more demands. Some decent local marmalade for one. Oh well, next time.
If don't understand the first goddamned thing about the subject, you shouldn't post.
- Have a picture
..but conscience action. As seen in this snippet, they know they will be putting small operators out of business to make sure the RIAA gets what it wants:
Webcasters and broadcasters asked that the Librarian reject the CARP's approach and provide them with an option to pay a rate based on a percentage of their revenues, rather than a per-performance rate.
...
Finally, the CARP noted that because many webcasters are currently generating very little revenue, a percentage of revenue rate would require copyright owners to allow extensive use of their property with little or no compensation.
1. stop playing riaa music. This will help independant artists (such as myself) alot, but will cause people to not hear the music they want to hear at first.
2. Don't host in the US, use overseas servers. The riaa will probably try and make their laws apply to other contries (stupid), but I doubt it will work on all countries.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
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.
7 cents per hundred wouldbe fine if they could offer a sensible service like the old my.mp3.com, or a request show, but they can't.
Here are the terms of the licence, which have lots of vague clauses about DRM type stuff that look as if they were deliberately written to be only settleable in court at great cost:
(v) the transmitting entity cooperates to prevent, to the extent feasible without imposing substantial costs or burdens, a transmission recipient or any other person or entity from automatically scanning the transmitting entity's transmissions alone or together with transmissions by other transmitting entities in order to select a particular sound recording to be transmitted to the transmission recipient, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998;
Is this an Anti-TiVo clause?
(vi) the transmitting entity takes no affirmative steps to cause or induce the making of a phonorecord by the transmission recipient, and if the technology used by the transmitting entity enables the transmitting entity to limit the making by the transmission recipient of phonorecords of the transmission directly in a digital format, the transmitting entity sets such technology to limit such making of phonorecords to the extent permitted by such technology;
viii) the transmitting entity accommodates and does not interfere with the transmission of technical measures that are widely used by sound recording copyright owners to identify or protect copyrighted works, and that are technically feasible of being transmitted by the transmitting entity without imposing substantial costs on the transmitting entity or resulting in perceptible aural or visual degradation of the digital signal, except that the requirement of this clause shall not apply to a satellite digital audio service that is in operation, or that is licensed under the authority of the Federal Communications Commission, on or before July 31, 1998, to the extent that such service has designed, developed, or made commitments to procure equipment or technology that is not compatible with such technical measures before such technical measures are widely adopted by sound recording copyright owners;
The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still.
(cross-posted from my weblog)
Some victory... instead of cutting off both arms, you get to keep one. :(
Ryan T. Sammartino
"Ancora imparo"
... is for Hilary Rosen to get a few pies in the face. Where's the widespread Hacktivism when we need it?!?
Someone mentioned the creation of a GCL or Gnu Content License not too long ago.
Does anyone think this would be a bad idea for recording artists to implement? Would consumers still pay for full albums on CD with all the extras or would they just swap freely without honoring the artists financially at all?
Any thoughts.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
So... where does that leave them? $500, certainly, and I'd imagine that Live365 is about to go under, leaving them without a bandwidth provider. I'm thinking about offering to step in if they take care of the licensing.
A few questions - *can* they play music from, say, MP3.com, with authorization? (Heck, I play guitar and sing - if I walked into their studio, could I play an original composition without having them have to pay?) And second - what is their fee scale?
Y'know - it seems really stupid that they are charged for broadcasting their own material. Does this mean that CU-C-ME or Pow-Wow chats (or whatever they are nowadays - I haven't used Internet speech chat in many years) are now under this fee schedual? They are broadcasting voice... ??
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
This is bad, really bad. Internet radio is going to be turned into the same censored piece of corporate garbage which is "FM" radio.
We need to organize to fight this. Laws can be changed.
And, I'm not just saying "hey guys, lets send out our angry little emails, or start an online petition," that stuff rarely yields results since it is never picked up by main stream media channels. It'd be awesome if we could organize some positive rallies in California. It would be hard to keep a bunch of marching middle class, riaa hating, suburbanites out of the news.
I'm probably going to send in this story into the guardian, the nation, as well as projectcensored.org This will be picked up an ranted about by the indi media for sure.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Even more disgusting, but certainly not suprising, is the RIAA's response to the announcement, saying, "[the rate] simply does not reflect the fair market value of the music as promised by the law."
Who's up for burning RIAA at the stake?
Krusty: Do we really want to live in a world without television? I think the living would envy the dead!
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
The ruling states that the charge applies unless the station has an agreement with someone who has broadcast rights (the copyright owner) to the music. So, concievibly, someone could set up a company which would sit between independent artists and the webcasters and set up the agreements.
Actually, I kinda like that idea...
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
I've worked in radio and the music industry for over thirty years. Today I'm embarrassed to admit it. This is yet another exapmle of the big fish swallowing up the little ones. The broadcast industry DOES NOT HAVE to pay these rates for over the air treansmission. All they pay is ASCAP and BMI fees, which are a percentage of their gross billing. Noncommercials pay a flat rate of about $1500-$2000 per year. Also, these fees go to the composers ....NOT the RIAA as the new fees will. This fee does not benefit the musician one single bit...all it does is fatten the coffers if the 'big five' record companies.
The irony is that this fee is likely to result in less music purchased, and less music broken into the marketplace...again hurting the smaller, independent companies and artists NOT the RIAA and it's ilk!
Finally, here's the total arrogance of the RIAA for you:
Comment of Cary Sherman, President, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) On Librarian's Decision On Internet Radio Royalty Rates June 20, 2002
"The import of this decision is that artists and record labels will subsidize the webcasting businesses of multi-billion dollar companies like Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks and Viacom. The rate, which cannot be squared with the decision of the arbitration panel, simply does not reflect the fair market value of the music as promised by the law. This decision will certainly reinforce the steadfast opposition of copyright owners to compulsory licensing."
These assholes STILL aren't happy!!!
They've trashed Internet broadcasting and they STILL want more!
I don't know about you, but I've purchased my LAST CD from the 'big five' record companies!
I suggest that you do the same...
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.
However, the RIAA owns the music, and they can do whatever they want with it. That's how capitalism works. The only legal recourse we have is to go elsewhere for music. Listen to bands outside the RIAA stranglehold. Support the webcasters who locate these bands and stream their music. If you're a musician, avoid RIAA-controlled distribution channels and go really indie.
It will hurt losing the stuff we already like that's locked up by the RIAA. But shit happens. Move on and make things better for the future.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
"The recording industry DOES (currently) perform a service. They find people with talent and produce them."
This can't be true.
Explain Britney Spears.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Tag's Trance Trip [tagstrance.com], one of my favorite internet radio stations of all time, just went down.
Danger, Tag:
The intro page is still there and has a bumper. Tag probably needs to take that down, too.
B-(
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A second source of music is your local library. Virtually every town of over 3000 people in the US has a library with a collection of CDs. Usually, there is a large selection of classical CDs, which are hard to find on the internet. Your taxes have purchased them, so make yourself some backup copies.
A third source of music is your local free performances. Your local university and high school will often have free recitals. Also, most major metropolitan areas have symphonies. Go ahead and check them out. Remember, if you have to pay for the performance, probably none of the money goes to the RIAA.
A fourth source is free internet archives of various sorts. This is most common classical and folk as opposed to pop. One site I'd recommend for folk is Roger McGuinn's Folk Den at http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden/ . McGuinn posts a new song, freely downloadable, every month since November of 95. Also, he testified on behalf of file sharing during the Senate hearings.
While not a free source of income, a good thing to do is to contact your favorite independet artists. Tell them about the problems with webcasting, and the chances they have to be widely heard. Tell them to band together. Send them the adresses of your favorite webcasters. Get the word out that they can make deals with these stations. I promise to email some of my favorite indie artists, and I would encourage you to do the same.
If consumers somehow manage to develop a spine, the RIAA won't even *have* money for payoffs. That's the beauty of the market - no matter how much the RIAA screams and throws a fit, no matter now many bribes pass under (or over) the table - in the form of campaign contributions, of course - the fed still can't force anyone to buy the crap they call music.
Evidently there is some definition of the word "talent" with which I have not been familiar.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Is this an Anti-TiVo clause?
Sounds like it's anti XM Radio.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still.
They're afraid that if you broadcast digitally your listeners will record digitally and obtain a perfect copy of the material.
Off-the-analog-radio-air recording has not been a big problem, but digital is a new world and they're scared.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Okay, I'll give it a shot... Britney Spears does have talent. Not talent for singing or songwriting, perhaps, but talent for projecting an image that can be sold to pre-adolescents, resulting in CD sales and profit. With the music industry, sales are the driving factor, not the production of quality music.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
This ruling can still be appealed in the US Court of Appeals (DC Circuit). I expect an appeal, simply because the cost of royalties for webcasting is ridiculous, even for commercial, big-corporation radio stations that simulcast. Bill Rose of Arbitron, the Nielsen of the radio industry, spells it out beautifully here. Even for the big boys the royalty rate would be about %25 of their advertising revenue. Hopefully the webcasters can hold on for another appeal.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I realize that you are not responsible for the contents of AP stories that appear on your website, but I think that you ought to (at least) read the story before featuring a link to it on your home page (www.cnn.com).
The 'Victory for Internet Radio' is a victory like the 'victory' that America had at Pearl Harbor in WWII. On the face of it, this was a disaster for the US Pacific Fleet, however it galvanized the US into action which led to the defeat of Japan -- a true Victory for the US.
I suggest that the final CARP rate setting deterimination has already caused Internet broadcasters to stop broadcasting, and more will follow over the next few weeks.
However, unless this determination gets overturned by the courts (probably unlikely given that it is people without money (internet radio) fighting people with money (RIAA)) I predict that alternative internet radio business models will arise. These models will be based on independant artists licensing their creative works at zero cost to internet radio stations (via an independant licensing agency) in return for airplay. This airplay will generate CD sales and thus the artist gets paid.
Where does this leave the RIAA? In bed with the small number of commercial AM/FM broadcasters who see their market share dwindling.
I know where I would invest my dollars. Do you?
It's possible... Thing is, while the RIAA can set up its own infrastructure bypassing those stupid royalties, other people can still come in with indy bands as content. The net is a very egalitarian medium, and if someone offers competing goods, people will take it. I suspect the free market will do better than the record cartel in the end.
Okay, now doesn't somafm mostly not play RIAA owned music? If so, then why would he have to pay RIAA. Also, if I make some music, I own the copyright, so I tell somafm that they can play it for free. They wouldn't need to pay the RIAA for that. And if a month from now, I sell it to RIAA then somafm would have to stop playing it, and it's not like they could make somafm pay for the time that they didn't even own the copyright.
Seems funny that all these webcasters claim to be playing independent music. Seems to me that if they're so scared of these fees then they must be playing RIAA music without permission. And any way you slice it, that's illegal, even before CARP fees.
Free Mac Mini
> 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.
It's certainly slowed down. But I foresee a further increase once the long-distance DSL variants have been rolled out. There's a huge amount of growth available in outlying suburbs that haven't been wired for digital cable and where CO runs are lengthy -- and where upper-middle-class denizens have fled from the city. It's an as-yet untapped market.
I believe the government should pay for everything. From now on, nobody will ever work. You'll just hang out and stuff, and the government will send you a hefty check each day. Little by little, people will spend the money, and it will eventually get back to the government. And then, someone will start a rival government, and people will get to choose which government they subscribe to. Eventually, there will be like 10,000 governments to choose from, and you'll get deals, like 10,000 free bucks when you sign up for a year or something like that. The next thing you know, someone will start a government to govern all the governments. And then, there will be competition in that area, so that governments get all kinds of free toasters or ice boxes or whatever when they sign up for some government-government. And then, there will be so much competition, that someone will start a government to govern all the government-governments. A hundred years down the road, every person will be the sole owner and operator of about 10 different governments of various levels and whatnot. Money will go left and right, up and down, and nobody will be able to figure out who is governing who.
Here's the crap part of the whole deal. Way back when record companies paid radio stations to play content. The government said "No, no" and the radio stations stopped paying the radio stations directly. In comes the "indie", a supposedly dissinterested third party paid by the record company to "promote" their music. In turn the "indie" pays the radio station for the "privilage" of just getting to "talk" about the music. Then it's up to the radio station to decide whether or not to play the music. The funny thing is that I hear no mention of what the fees are associated with the privilage of "talking" to the radio stations and from the sound of it it depends on the music and who pays the "indie". The other problem here is that the record company continues to pay the indie for as long as that music plays within the given market. They then turn around and charge the radio station for use of their "product".
To top it all of Hillary Rosen attempts to play the victim to it all stating "What can I do" as if she's being held hostage by the indies. "That's just the way it is" she says while she circumvents the letter of the law. The radio stations pretend that they aren't doing anything wrong, the indies just laugh while they rake in 500,000 here and 600,000 there. It's a nice tidy little cycle that the webcasters won't be included in. Can you see any of the indies going after webcasters? They work for the record companies and the record companies already have all the channels of distribution that they want, therefore there's no need for indies to go out on a limb and provide a service that noone wants to pay for. To top it off that means that the webcasters won't make the same capital that the radio stations will and therefore won't be able to come up with the cash to pay "royalties" easily.
It's a sad sad suck-ass system when the record companies can so easily play the victim in all this.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Ooh - indeed. Endless potential finantial pain. Another related question is if the domain of this ruling only applies to the Internet, or if it applies to all networks, private or not. For instance, if you set up a network in your household, or even between households using a radio-style music server, would you have to pay? Would a small gaming voice-chat application have to start charging if it discovered users playing music in a radio-like manner?
Also, are copyright owners required to give warning before charging "damages" if what the user thought was telephone-like usage ends up being qualified as radio-like usage?
Ack - "copy", "right" indeed.
:^)
Ryan Fenton
The very essense of civil disobedience is believing that the law is unjust, and that no one should follow it.
Actually the essence of civil disobedience is to disagree with a law and break it openly and accept the consequences. The hope is that by being upfront about WHY you are breaking the law and getting enough attention drawn to the issue in question that the law will be changed/abandoned.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Performance Fee
(per performance)
If by performace they mean per song, then we are going to be hearing a lot of "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by webcasters.
I've been thinking lately that the way to get around this is to not actually stream the music - just publish a playlist. Ever listen to a radio station and hear (and enjoy) some forgotten track from a CD that you already own? It could work like that - a recipe, rather than a meal.
The players can already do this - Xmms/winamp can have playlists that have varied sources - the 'Broadcaster' just gives the directions and lets an intelligent client decide the source for the songs.
If the song is already in your collection, play from there, otherwise choose a source that fits your bandwidth/ethical restrictions. (Gnutella, kazaa, your friend's server, whatever.)
Freely-available songs could be streamed/cached, as well as talk or dare I say it, commercials. If a song can't be found, perhaps a list of alternatives could be provided.
If I have a VPN connection to a close friend's music collection, I could use those and nobody could stop me and I know that some of my friend's private collections are a lot better than what shows up on the p2p services.
My own site is a PostNuke site that automatically publishes an RDF for the news on the site - many 'blogs also do this - It would be absolutely trivial to also publish a "recipe" of my ideal music playlist with localized start times as a linkable RDF.
Just a thought -
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
(If it's possible to GPL an idea in a slashdot post, I just did...)
-- My Weblog.
This article doesn't look like it's been listed here in the comments but if it has forgive me.
7 1-2002May25.html
Here's a quote:
"If these forecasts are true, most small webcasters would have to shut down, and Web radio would walk the same dreary path of corporate consolidation as commercial FM."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A82
This is definitely true. I used to listen to a program on a local AM station WRKO due to poor AM reception at my house. Now they've had to stop webcasting.
I run Detroit Industrial Underground. My station has a 20 simultaneous listener capacity, and I've been broacasting for 3.5 years. To give you an idea of the small scale of most internet broacasts, DIU is currently ranked 222 out of around 2800 stations on the Shoutcast directory for total time spend listening (TTSL).
Some thoughts, based on what I've read here:
Terrestrial radio stations with webcasts are as unhappy with these rates as internet broadcasters are, and they'll be lobbying against this as well.
Some people have said that these rates won't apply to stations which only play non-RIAA material. While common sense would suggest that, it has not been proven yet, and common sense doesn't seem to apply to anything involving the RIAA and U.S. Congress.
Ephemeral recordings are "temporary" recordings made solely for broadcast purposes. In the case of internet radio, they're referring to MP3s. In practice, its an excuse to add another 8.8% fee on top of the per listener per song $0.0007.
Moving outside the U.S. won't save internet radio. U.S. based Broadcasters can be tracked through ISP's and billing relationships with hosting companies. Also, other countries have licensing bodies which are just as rapacious as the RIAA. In Canada, SOCAN is pushing Tariff 22, which imposes a $0.25 per unique listener per month fee. This adds up to more than the RIAA + BMI/ASCAP/SESAC fees, and forces listener tracking/subscriptions for auditing purposes. See the Stop Tariff 22 website for the details.
The battle isn't lost yet. On the Shoutcast list, we're working on our response to this. In the meantine, check out Save Internet Radio and the Radio and Internet Newsletter. Finally, write your reps in Congress, and include your snail mail addresss so they know you're a constituent.
Try ampcast (my preference) or javamusic or electronicscene for real independents who still have some rights. It is too late to help the people at mp3.com. They've already signed off on a bad deal. They're Vivendi, just without getting paid. (Vivendi has a history of kicking out artists who're owed money instead of paying them. The artist agreement allows for this...)
the broadcaster has no need or reason to know how many people are receiving the stream as they only send out one copy of the data. granted with the ISP monopoly controlled by media companies today its doubtful we'll ever see multicast to the edge of the network. :(
Their website reads: "SomaFM: killed by the RIAA. June 20, 2002. With CARP royalties of $500 a DAY, SomaFM cannot continue broadcasting."
The smaller streaming and hobby sites will most likely have to pay NOTHING, ZIP, NADA.
.07 and .02 for for non-profits. No where does it say ANYONE can pay zero.
And where, pray tell, does it say that?
It says
Posting false information could explain why you are posting at zero rather than 1. I could post this at 2, but that would be a waste.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
If they want fees for netcasts, so be it.
But only if THEY GIVE US BACK THE FUCKING D CLASS BROADCASTING LICENSES!!!
I hate these bastards so much its going to eventually kill me, must we be spoon fed everything?
ENOUGH! They want a war, fine, they got it. Anyone want to try to organize a broadcast radio blackout of some sort?
Anyone care to bet on whether, once the per-listener/per-song fees are finally in and all the appeals over, the RIAA will fire up scads of tasks to suck down webcast streams and run the meter up as high as they can?
(For that matter, over in the Unintended Consequences Dept., look for changes to webcasting software to force the streams to start on song boundaries and do something--maybe pop-up windows à la NetZero--to make sure there's a human at the other end actually listening. Once the per-listener/per-song fees are in place, webcasters will really not like you if you forget and leave XMMS running while you're on your two-week trip to Australia...)
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.
Up to now there has only been one such transaction (the infamous Yahoo thing). But it doesn't have to be that way! Indie labels and indie broadcasters can agree to whatever terms they like, right? So now is the time to do it, and then play a fuckload of music based on those terms, and then MAKE THAT THE STANDARD when this is inevitably taken to court and reviewed again and again in the next few years.
I suggest the following terms at no charge to you if you're a label or a webcaster: 10% of gross revenues. C'est tout! Put this in a real enforceable contract between (say) Pork records and (say) SomaFM, and then take that to court when the RIAA lies and claims that there has only been one contract between a cartel-member label and a cartel-member broadcaster.
IMHO indie labels / webcasters MUST do this to prevent the compulsory terms from becoming a bit more compulsory. DO IT NOW!
sulli
RTFJ.
That's per song per listener, so multiply that by the number of listeners. Also, if you hear a second's worth of the song and then decide you don't like it or you lose your connection, the webcaster still gets charged as if you heard the whole song...and the webcaster is going to have to keep track of when and who listens and what they listen to--i.e. do RIAA's market research for them at their own expense. Also, come October, all webcasters get billed for the past four years, and have to pay up all at once.
I'm curious about something.
In one of the previous articles about this issue, someone mentioned that the organizations that sell licenses for the big labels (I think they're BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC) force people to pay even if the broadcaster doesn't play any of their music. Is there any truth to this? Have you been approached by any of them? If so, how did you deal with them?
Vivendi, through mp3.com, hold a perpetual license to any song hosted on their system for the purposes of something called a 'secure account', if I remember correctly. That narrows the field a bit. It's not a particularly broad license, but it is perpetual. Section 4.6 (b) and (c), upon termination they retain rights necessary to "(b) provide perpetual access to Standard Content and Channel Content added to Secure Accounts pursuant to the terms of this Agreement; (c) provide perpetual access to CD Content to holders of Secure Accounts who purchased that CD Content, or with your permission, otherwise added that CD Content to their Secure Accounts". Sorry.
And I was giving them too much credit: it's not five days, it's three days notice. Section 4.11: "Modification or Amendment of Agreement. We reserve the right, in our sole discretion, to change, modify, add or remove all or part of this Agreement. Notice of any amendments and/or modifications shall be sent to you or posted in your Artist Admin Area at least three (3) days prior to their effective date. In the event that you do not consent to any such amendments and/or modifications, your sole recourse shall be to terminate this Agreement with respect to any or all Programs, as provided above. A copy of the most current version of this Agreement may be found at: http://www.mp3.com/newartist/agree.html." You'll note in Section 1.2 that among other things they claim a non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide license to "publicly perform, publicly display, broadcast, encode, edit, alter, modify, reproduce, transmit, manufacture, distribute and synchronize with visual images". There is nothing forcing them to do 'non-exclusive', that's just history from pre-Vivendi mp3.com. Under the current agreement, they could change that to 'non-exclusive for material already in use elsewhere and exclusive for anything for which we are the sole licensees as of (date)' on three days notice, and it would be binding: you would hold copyright but you would have agreed to an exclusive license by not cancelling your account.
In order to actually grab copyright, they would have to assert the work was 'for hire', and that is absurd, so technically, you're right and they can't grab your copyright in the sense of 'legally they own the song as if they'd written it'. They can only grab exclusive, perpetual rights to it in any form imaginable, on three days notice, anytime they want, provided you don't spot them doing it and bail.
I'm not a lawyer. I suggest that if you are a lawyer, you run this agreement by a lawyer. Ask them if I'm telling the truth. I think they will back up everything I've said, to the extent that I've said it- I'm trying to describe very accurately the boundaries within which they can fsck you over completely. And yes, they get perpetual rights. The word perpetual is in there twice, and it's not talking about perpetual motion.
Contracts by entertainment lawyers are like spaghetti code. Ask one if I'm not correct about that.
Oh, the Ignorance. The internet broadcasters should be PAID for providing publicity of the music - it's already cost them time, infrastructure, and bandwidth.
... Indie promoters will pay them to air the latest Britney record.
But, they WILL be paid, just as regular broadcasters will be paid
Now you can cringe.
here.