Slashdot Mirror
Small Webcasters get Powerful New Ally
An anonymous reader writes "On, Sunday, October 20, 2002, the RIAA's subsidiary, SoundExchange, was set to introduce draconian new fees on small internet webcasters - fees that were designed to drive those webcasters out of business and preserve the RIAA's monopoly on the distribution of music in North America. One of those small webcasters is the Triangle's classical music station, WCPE - quite possibly the finest classical music station in the world. Now it turns out that WCPE has an 800 lb gorilla in their corner, and he's set his sights on the RIAA."
Really when it comes down to brass tacks ... when the rubber meets the road ... Does it truly mater why he did it? Politics makes strange bedfellows. This is evident. You don't have to like them to have them help your cause. US and Soviet Union in WW2 had the same enemy and worked together. Just need to watch people that you ally with in on situation in case they swig opposite on others that you are for.
It says he stopped it because smaller webcasters said the new 'lower' rates would be worse than the 'higher' ones after a certain amount of time and would drive them out of business. Even the new 'lower' rates were too high for some of them.. So im guessing it'll go from .07 per listener to maybe .01 which would still be too much IMO.. RIAA doesn't deserve squat for free advertising. RIAA should be paying webcasters to play the music.
"In case it gets slashdotted?" The article is hosted on Yahoo News. You can't slashdot yahoo. Yahoo slashdots you.
The last time someone managed to make a network of hacked computers big enough that they could DDOS yahoo to a crawl, it made the national news. Slashdot isn't going to come near to that.
I believe that was the infamous legislation which had a last minute 26 page addendum tacked on that changed it from being designed to ease finanical impact on small Webcasters into something deisgned to save a mere handful of the largest small webcasters and leave the others to hang.
It snuck through the house before people realized it had changed. So blocking it in the Senate actually was acting on the side of the small webcasters.
Check out the previous news on the subject for more details.
It's the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and the Research Triangle Park, which is the home of RedHat
Press any key to continue, any other key to quit.
I'd call Senator Jesse Helms at least a 2 ton gorilla myself.... ;>
It is nice to see that Jesse Helms isn't taking a vacation in his last few months in office. (He's a short-timer -- he retires at teh end of the year.)
Catherine
Helms is NOT RUNNING FOR REELECTION
his term expires in january, he is not soliciting any contributions
I didn't think he was an 800lb gorilla so I went to google to find an image of him. I found some, but when I went to the first site it was taken down by "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".
I guess he is an 800 lb gorilla.
the difference between that "reduced flat rate" and the 70 cents per 1000 listeners per song can really be quite huge (even to very small stations).
lets say a station reaches 100 people on average and at 4 minutes per track averages 15 songs an hour. that's 360 songs a day, or 131,400 a year... at the other rate of 7 cents per 100 listeners it works out to a fee of $9,198 a year. to someone like this a flat rate of $500 seems like a pretty huge difference... heck this flat rate would come to almost half as much even if you only averaged 10 listeners (500 vs 918).
too bad the flat rate is only good till congress acts on the pending legislation, because this deal would probably actually be fairly viable for quite a few webcasters
They won't have the opportunity to do so. He's retiring at the end of this term, and is about to be replaced in a few months . . .
Someone mentioned this before, but he got modded to 0 for some reason. Sen Helms is not running for reelection. His term is up in January. There is no "shakedown".
say what? Helms blocked the bill which would have *lowered* fees for small webcasters. (Read the article!) The only reason the webcasters got a reprieve is that SoundExchange (the company that collects the royalties) decided to not collect payments until the legislation is passed.
The Republicans are generally not friends with Holleywood and the music industry. The Democrats are traditionally those industries' allies. So while it's just a -tad- bit surprising, it shouldn't come as a complete shock. I never thought I'd see the day though when Jesse Helms would actually fight on the right side of an issue and be anything other than an embarassment of a senator.
If I am an independent musician, can't I just make a deal with a local webcaster at a rate that we negotiate?
IANAWYNTBTKTFS (I am not a whatever you need to be to know this for sure), but I think you're always free to do this as an independent, or even through your label. The issue here is the mandatory licensing terms which allow broadcasters (and webcasters) to play songs without explicit permission as long as they pay the royalty fees set out in the law. Otherwise, stations would have to negiotiate individually with each and every copyright holder in order to buy permission to play songs. Now I might be somewhat wrong in that stations may need to pay the RIAA no matter what (even if they only play independent music) just because it was the easiest way to set this up in the olden days.
Similar mechanisms have been proposed to allow anyone to manufacture life saving drugs or use old software patents as long as they pay a set royalty rate. The rates would presumably be higher than what you might be able to get if you negiotiated your own terms and higher than what the original company would normally charge.
My next sig will be ready soon, but friends can beat the rush!
he is very very responsive to his constituents. Every story I've ever heard about people contacting him for help (not necessarily positions on issues, but help) has had results.
I only hope that the senator who replaces him will be so responsive, and not just pretend to be from North Carolina...
The Triangle is in North Carolina, consisting of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill. The Univerisities: Duke, NC State, and UNC-CH. Otherwise known as the Research Park, such companies as RedHat are based here, IBM, Cisco, Nortel and others haev large offices here as well.
No. Why would it? If you create the content, you are the copyright holder. It would apply to your friend's garage band music only if your friend's garage band is represented by RIAA or ASCAP or similar. Likewise, the fees don't apply to any sound recordings in the public domain, provided the songs recorded are also in the public domain.
Michael"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
I have a stream that plays a three hour loop of the Best of my radio show, so I own the copyright on that and it's all that's on the stream... Why should I pay the RIAA for this?
You shouldn't. What makes you think you should?
the bill he helped stop was not the 500 dollar fee, the 500 dollar fee is what SoundForge decided to allow until the bill currently blocked in the Senate's situation is resolved.
The blocked bill which did pass in the House underwent some very radical last minute changes due to negotiations with a small group of webcasters and the RIAA. A bit more info about what actually happened here
Welcome to the Real World, where nothing is black or white, no one is evil or good and nothing is _ever_ as simple as it seems.
Nah, that's the "ironic pseduo-post-modern world."
The real world has quite its share of things that are simple and black/white good/evil. They're just not EVERYTHING, and everything has good parts and evil parts.
Cases in point: Hitler & The "Tarot Card Sniper" opposed to Mother Theresa or the United Way. (Heck, the UW is a great example--they're a good thing with bad people at some of their hearts.)
"Those who call the world a thousand shades of grey forget about black and white far too often."
Mother Theresa: According to this book by Christopher Hitchens, Mother Theresa is "a religious fundamentalist, a political operative, a primitive sermonizer and an accomplice of worldly powers." The business that she created in India has made well over $50 million, exploiting what amounts to slave labor. Perhaps her main worldly goal was to become a saint. Sure, she helped dying people, but should that blind us to what else was going on?
United Way: In 1995, former United Way President William Aramony was convicted for conspiracy, fraud, and tax crimes related to his stealing from the United Way. See, e.g. this site. Great use of your charity dollars, right? Or a precursor to our corporate accounting scandals of today?
Now I'm not saying that this is the definitive story on your examples. But is it black and white?
"If I could live to be several hundred
I could take a walk and really wander, really wonder."
Most copyrights of the SOUND RECORDINGS of classical music are held by RIAA member labels or their affiliates.
Remember folks, we're not talking about the composers. We're talking about who owns the sound recordings, made by the conductor and the musicians who played on that recording.
Classical music is not an RIAA alternative, unless you are buying some of those Costco CDs released by eastern eurpoean orchestras (which are also copyrighted).
Then she has certainly found a loophole in the Big Law, the one that says that you cannot take it with you. She died in 1997.
Good point, but let's take a look at a small station's total yearly costs. SomaFM actually breaks this down for you on their donations page.
Here is a breakdown of our costs:
Monthly Internet connectivity between the studio and the servers - $850/month (although we need to increase this to handle the additional channels, we're maxing out our bandwidth now)
T1s to the studio, server colocation, internet fees - $1500-2000 a month
Software and hardware coss - $600 a month (It costs about $800-900 in hardware and software for each new channel we add)
Rent: $0
Salaries: $0
ASCAP and BMI fees - $700 a year and rising (the more listeners we have the more we have to pay)
SomaFM DJs spend hundreds of dollars a month out of their own pockets on new music for the station.
Other things SomaFM needs:
Bandwidth! - We can always use more bandwidth. If you are an ISP or Web Host with a minimum of a T3 fractional connection and can commit to giving SomaFM 2-5mb/sec of bandwidth, and have a machine that can run the Shoutcast server software (Linux, BSD, Solaris versions are available) then you have what it takes. (The CPU load added by shoutcast is negligible). Contact Rusty Hodge for the details
Noncommercial station too... while $500/year donation from generous listeners like you (ok, I've been listening to NPR go through it's beg cycle) is nothing to sneeze at, it's hardly the whole picture.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Perhaps it's worth mentioning that Digitally Imported hit a record high of about 11,000 concurrent listeners tonight... this is great as on friday they didn't even know if they'd still be broadcasting after the weekend.