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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."
If you read the full article, you'll notice that Helms' office mentions that they heard from Religious broadcasters in the area that felt that the burden would still be too great on them.
Nevertheless, nice to see that even the Religious Right is "getting the idea" in terms of dealing with the RIAA...
Jesse Helms? I never would have thought that he was 800lbs...
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The best trance stations on the internet went down because of this law, and my music selection has hurt since. The only one left is Digitally Imported, which is ok but I like Tag's Trance and XTC radio better. A "dance" radio station started broadcasting in dallas recently, it is ok but is very repetitive. And I did buy two or three cds of artists I had heard on tag's or xtc, but now I buy none. Well, those were import CDs anyway and RIAA probably didnt get anything from them.
How does this hurt the RIAA. This bill was going to forcibly reduce the royalties that these stations would have to pay. Now, with the bill blocked, they have to pay the higher rate or opt for the RIAA's "reduced" flat rate.
I'm not seeing how Helms, the 800 pound gorilla?, is benefitting the small broadcasters.
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.
After all, he specializes in MP3s, and his songs are streamed from his site and mp3.com, but then again, one of his song is called "Why won't Jesse Helms just hury up and die"
I guess we now know why, he's meant to save the webcasters.
because I have been enjoined by this Holy Office to abandon the false opinion which maintains that the Sun is the centre
"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.
Well, you can bet the RIAA won't make the mistake of overlooking his campaign funding again! ;)
"...the Triangle's classical music station..."
What the hell is "the Triangle"? And why do they have a classical music station. Now I can understand a square might have a classical station, or maybe a pentagram would have an acid rock station.
Maybe it's because they use triangles in symphonies. What kind of station would a circle have, I wonder?
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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.
Beethoven and Mozart will compose more symphonies if they can put bread on their table.
Folks, if you dislike the RIAA's tactics and would like to listen to some alternative music, please give classical music a try...there's nothing like listening to some good ol' music.
What is the role of the government in all of this and why is there a need to regulate these prices?
If I am an independent musician, can't I just make a deal with a local webcaster at a rate that we negotiate?
Does anybody know?
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Don't forget to email your congressmen
Who obvious has a filter set up to delete emails from constituents.
*DrugCheese rants*
I'm not a big fan of Jesse Helms, but it appears
that he is doing exactly what he should do as a
senator for North Carolina. He's representing the
interests of the state's residents in the Senate,
vs. representing the interests of an out of state
campaign donor.
How many states stand to gain under the webcasting
rates as approved in the House? Will there be a lot
of new jobs pursuing small webcasters who haven't
paid up? Will there be a lot of new technical skills
dispersed through the population by reducing the
number of webcasters through expensive licensing
and/or royalies fees? Will there be a boom in artisic
expression thanks to reduced chances for artists to
gain exposure?
Helms is right on this one. I wish more legislators
were looking out for their own constituencies on
matters like this, DMCA, etc.
Damin that Helms! I've released 3 albums of really killer sermons, and I haven't gotten a dime from these stations yet.
The article says that the bill was DESIGNED to ease the financial burden on small webcasters, but in all reality, it probably would not have.
.07 per person per song in royalties. Instead, at this point they can pay $500/yr (from 1998 to present, IIRC) to cover their costs.
.07/per song+person could raise some HEFTY fees.
They were to be charged
The small webcasters themselves had not been consulted when the original law was drafted and therefore felt that they would be put out of business by these "small" fees.
Sometimes, even a blind squirrel finds a nut.
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I thought surely my stance of thinking both the RIAA and the Religious Right were both wrong about everything would never be problematic.
But, no! Now, I might owe my ability to listen to all my favorite death metal, synth-pop, and hard house/trance webcasts to a group of people who generally only support things I vehemently oppose.
So. . . confused. . . cannot pick. . . side. . .
So, Jesse Helms has not held onto his Senate seat for as long as he has by not taking care of his constituents. However, he's retiring this year, which means that he's not going to be able to do this for much longer. It's unclear whether either of the folks running for his seat (Elizabeth Dole and Erskine Bowles) will take the same position.
The real question is... Why are Rep. Howard Coble (Also North Carolina - R) and Sen. Ernest Hollings (South Carolina - D) not doing the same thing?
He's an 800 year old gorilla.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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
The Religious Right, incredible as it may seem, can be the killer ally of the digital freedom movement, just like Stalin was in WWII. Remember that morality vs. copyright case? (the right to edit movies to the customer's content)
When talking to any individual with such orientation, we have to stress that the current copyright fundamentalism is made to favor Hollywood - you know, that big, unholy, pornography-peddling anti-God collective in California. Mentioning Scientology might help too. YMMV.
Now THAT is an 800-lb. gorilla.
I heard awhile back that Jesse Helms was threatening awhile back to throw his weight to get the DMCA repealed if the big corps didn't stop abusing it. Seems he thought the bill was a good idea when it was passed, but believes the ways its being used are not the ways it was intended.
Now this is happening. But this article is so poorly written-- it starts out saying that jesse helms blocked a bill providing netcaster relief, but then later seems to be saying he only did this becuase he was holding out for a bill that gave even more netcaster relief.
So, is the idea that he actually believes the copyright laws should be in the public benefit? If so, okay, it's always good when "conservatives" actually attempt to uphold the principles the country was founded on as opposed to trying to disassemble them, but if that's the case why hasn't he actually done anything against the DMCA except for some public whining about it? And what does he think about the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which is one of the biggest sources of food for corporate abuse of copyright? Has he just not read it?
damp cloth, to use the Streisand-style Shakespearian. The point is that some of Senator Helms' constituents had an issue with a bill and so Senator Helms held it up. That's the way it's supposed to work. This does not reflect upon any large political quadron.
Dear god, please don't ever make me imagine Jesse Helms as a bedfellow.
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Now they have to pay the higher rate and gamble on whether they get any deal at all. Had Helms allowed the bill to pass, the small broadcasters would be paying a smaller fee and could follow up with another bill to gamble on.
A bird in hand....
A large chunk of classical music manuscripts are out of copyright. That means that if you can find someone to perform it, you can create free music. How are musicians paid? Recordings of concerts, where the costs are already met by selling tickets, might be one way. The quality won't be as high as a specially-made recording but it might be good enough. Whether the performers would agree depends on how much money they would get from enforcing copyright on the recording and trying to sell it commercially (not much I suspect).
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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
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.
Dude, at least spell his name correctly. Misspelling it puts you on par with people who yammer on about "Linux Torvalds"...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
This is great and all that the bill was held up, but Jesse Helms? The man has 9 toes in the grave, and will be lucky if he lives long enough to retire at the end of this year.
It hurts when I pee.
Why do webcasters have ANY say in what the RIAA charges for allowing them to broadcast their music? If they think it is too much, then why not play music from another group that is more affordable?
How is this any different than somebody deciding to sell Ford cars and then complaining that Ford won't give them the cars to sell for $1 each?
If somebody owns something, then they can charge whatever they want to allow other people to use it. If you think that the charge is too much for the product, then DON'T BUY IT!
(It's possible that I'm completely missing some pertinent facts about this issue. If so please reply.)
The same day that this story is posted, Whitney Houston's new album is leaked to the internet a full month before its release date. Awesome. Die RIAA, DIE!
~ now you know
The legislation that Helms blocked would have charged small webcasters a fee that, frankly, seems pretty trivial. If your margins are so thin that $500 per year makes the difference between making money or losing it, well, what you're running is not a business, it's a hobby. And, for that matter, I can easily see even hobbyists being willing to pay that much money. Heck, it's going to cost them more than that just for the data connection capable of supporting a half-dozen streams.
Now, I think small webcasters who broadcast their own material have a legitimate beef if the bill requires them to pay the RIAA, but for webcasters who are broadcasting a significant amount of RIAA music, then, frankly, it seems like a pretty decent deal.
I also think the artists have a legitimate beef, because practically none of this money will make it back to them. Since there's no accounting for individual songs required, there's no way to decided how much of the money should go to which artist. To record labels, that means the artists get none of it.
In summary, there seem to be problems with the way this is being done, but they're the same problems that exist with the Audio CD-R taxes -- the money goes to the Established Labels, regardless of what music is actually webcasted/copied, and the artists don't get any of it. But the amount of money is so trivial that I can't see it causing any real problems, even for semi-serious hobbyists.
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Dear sir,
It's hard to understand how I would include music that I still don't know in my playlists. Please ellaborate on that.
Yours truly,
Carlos.
Talk to us again once they get to censoring everything Hollywood puts out for sexual content and violence.
That'd be the point. See, the same people that are preventing you from watching DVDs on linux because you might steal them are preventing THEM from buying copies of "The Green Mile" with all the 'damns' changed to 'darns'.
Never confuse volume with power.
I work in a large CD store on the East Coast (Which one? I'll give you a hint, we've been financially fucked ever since the late 1990s, only partially due to P2P, more due to some really stupid decisions made out in California [that's another hint]). This gives me a unique opportunity to get a mildly decent idea of what people are buying - there's an almost representative sample of college kids, ten year olds, minivan moms, old fogies, hippie burnouts, and Dr. Joe Average in his SUV. Granted, classical music is not the largest seller in this store. But the people who buy classical music buy in BULK. It's not uncommon for one customer to slap down three Benjamins (that's $300 for those of you not 'hip' to my street slang) at a time for his latest classical bonaza. And several "artists" (Charlotte Church, Bocelli, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall) have reguarly placed in the top 25 sellers for the store - during weeks when Dave Matthews, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other mainstream artists came out with new releases. Granted, I'm not a fan of any of these artists (and Ms. Krall is slightly more in the jazz/vocals realm) - but what's important is that these people are selling in big numbers, which means SOMEONE out there is buying the stuff. To say that "people don't like classical music nowadays" is a rather ignorant statement to make. One of the reasons why classical doesn't often make it to the charts is that, let's take an example... Beethoven's 9th symphony. Would you like the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Ensemb-- do you understand my point? There's a wealth of different versions to choose from, and so the already merely-moderate consumer base is spread even thinner.
Granted, classical isn't usually that popular with the under-30 crowd (generalization). But it's been constantly popular with the elderly for the past three or four generations - and those aren't the same elderly, because OLD PEOPLE DIE. However, new ones are always cropping up to take their place. You can usually tell them by the Oldsmobiles with the stuffed animals in the back.
I think the difference is that Quarex has never tried to forbid the "churchies" from listening to their music, but the churchies have a history of wanting to censor things that they find objectionable.
Ironically, the last parts of your post did describe the attitude of organized religion, though.
Murphy was an optimist.
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;..."
No, no. Thats *Darned* if you do, damned if you don't...
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?
if we didn't have copyright laws at all?
I've lived in North Carolina pretty much my entire life, and I'm celebrating the fact that Helms will finally be out of office after this election. Great, he made the right call this time, but a broken clock is right twice a day, too.
;) I don't know what the conservative Republicans are making of this year's election, but I'm sure it'll be a lot more interesting than the last few have been...
Helms has stayed on office for this long for ONE very simple reason: He's pro-tobacco, and tobacco farmers in NC are almost "activists" when it comes to keeping their interests represented in the government, around here. If the tobacco market collapses, the ones who can't effectively change to another cash crop will be out of business, and most such farms are family affairs.
Helms' approach wouldn't work, except most other people seem too apathetic to bother voting someone else in; so, while people complain about it, they don't DO anything about it, but that's the way the cookie crumbles.
I'm looking forward to this year's election: A woman from out of state on one side, and a Democrat on the other -- talk about a dilemma!
The Helms Era is finally ending, and at least some folks are going to celebrate.
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You shouldn't verb words.
almost as ironic as how RIAA companies (whose artists gleefully trash the Ten Commandments) whine, "thou shalt not steal copyrighted tunes."
Ugh! I just agreed with Jesse Helms. I feel dirty.
t'nera semordnilap
He was heard saying afterwards:
"And when we're done with RIAA, we should think about a first strike with nuclear weapons in Korea, and in manchuria."
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
I've been awaiting the damage to WCPE for some time. Happy to see that they might not be affected so greatly. WCPE is a great station where they play classical music and DON'T just get money from the government, like PBS. It's a good example of how the market has demonstrated the ability to provide something people think it can't, more efficiently than the government.
I'm also against state sponsored gay marriage--if they want to get married in their faith fine, but I don't think the state can or should legislate morality, I'll leave that to the churches.
To be logically consistent you would then be against state-sponsored straight marriage, too. By giving special priviledges or burdens to a straight couple who want to get married in their faith - isn't that also legislating morality?
Why not be consistent? Either allow gay couples the same rights that het couples get, or don't give couples special rights over people who freely choose to remain unmarried.
God is real unless declared integer