The New Webcasting Compromise

arkham6 writes "According to a story on Yahoo, it appears that the RIAA and negotiators for webcasters have reached a tentative deal for reduced rates for 'small' webcasters. However, it appears now that the artists themselves are going to jump into the fray because the record companies now may be able to weasel out of paying the artists."

Comments

Librarian: did he ever admit the bad data source?

[geekotourist]

After the head librarian set the rates, it came out that the numbers he worked with came from Yahoo, which set that rate to shut out small broadcasters. It is as if an economist setting some tax rates for, say, software, used numbers straight from Microsoft, even though Microsoft can do monopoly pricing. Or if the economist was testing the average price of toys, and measured prices only on November 26 and December 26 (both traditionally big sales days in the US). In other words, the foundation of his report- the Yahoo data- was unreliable.

Did he ever admit that his model relied on abnormal data? I've seen nothing that shows that he re-ran any of his financial models. A good researcher admits when a data source is retroactively found to be inaccurate- the librarian is so far not acting as such. He needs to redo his calculations based on multiple data sources.

The whole concept is nonsense.

[Beautyon]

We listen to online freeform radio from the USA every day. They have realtime updated playlists. Its simple to find information about the music being played, by a simple right click. We can then check out the t-shirts and CDs.

There should be no charge for streaming online from non commercial entities. Period. Anyone can start a station, and see thier trafic explode if they play good sets. This new tax will dampen down or cap the potential size of audiences, which for independent labels will be a very bad thing.

Anyway, how are they goning to police this?

Streaming is no different to file sharing; its just copying a very long number. There cannot be one law for streaming and no law for P2P filesharing; there should be the same unrestrictive constitutional guarantees for both.

Copyright is Haram. This means that you can put a server in a sharia country, securely tunnel into it and then stream from there. Unfortunately the cost of doing this wont be worth the hassle, much less the threat of having charges to a company in Iran showing up on your credit card bill!