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Webcaster Alliance Threatens To Sue RIAA
detroitindustrial writes "The Washington Post reports that the Webcaster Alliance is threatening to sue the RIAA under the Sherman Antitrust Act. In their letter to the RIAA, the Webcaster Alliance alleges that the RIAA and the Voice of Webcasters negotiated in collusion and, 'were apparently intent on either eliminating their competitors and/or raising barriers to entry in the market for small commercial webcasting.' It goes on to say that the RIAA also wanted to eliminate smaller webcasters, who tend to play more independent material, in order to maintain their monopoly on music distribution."
From their FAQ: "Webcaster Alliance was formed to encourage fair treatment and growth for webcasters of all sizes, from the smallest hobbyists to large terrestrial radio stations. Webcaster Alliance works to address the technological, legislative and content development and distribution issues that face webcasters, the streaming media community and streaming media listeners."
They pay royalties to organizations that give money directly to the artists, thus bypassing the record companies! Really!
BUT, Congress and the FCC decided that webcasting counts as mechanical reproduction, not just broadcasting, so you've gotta pay royalties to the record companies as if you were selling copies of their CDs. (Or offering them for download.)
This is called *CORUPTION IN THE GOVERNMENT*, boys and girls!
Recording and radio are two very different models for distributing music. Recorded music is sold in a play-when-you-want-it form that the artist and their promoters expect to be paid for. Radio is the establishment of a channel through which music is pushed, and the artists see this as a promotional vehicle.
Artists need radio airplay to start their carrers. Hardly anybody will pay to hear an artist they've never heard before, so it's a critical first step in becoming an established artist so they can make sales with CDs and concert tickets. It's the free samples they give away so people will be more likely to buy the products.
The thing is, the RIAA tries to keep radio stations on a tight leash. If you want to have early access to the hot new song from established artist A, you have to play the songs from the not-yet-known-to-anybody artists B, C, and D. They RIAA tries hard to claim that there's not a specific quid-pro-quo, but everybody knows its the stations that are most cooperative in playing the arists the label wants played that get the most access to that label's popular artists.
This is why the RIAA would like to see the small time indie webstreamers vanish... if they're playing indie music they'll create demand for the artists who aren't being distributed by the RIAA members, and effectively steal market share from them. If it were possible for an artist to establish credibilty through non-RIAA means such as indie webstreamers and P2P downloads, and then get thier songs onto over-the-air radio stations, that artist could then enter the concert market and bypass the RIAA altogether. The RIAA would like the rule that you must already have an RIAA-published CD before being heard radio channels to hold true because that cements their role in the process, however the technology now exists to promote an artist without ever having a CD... and that's what really scares the RIAA.
Typical straw-man situation. They struck a deal with the 13 webcasters most friendly to them, rather than the webscasters that they already ran out of business. They're trying to claim those 13 represent the whole population of webcasters, but they don't.
| Unlike traditional radio it is easy to make copys [sic] of songs that have been webcasted
As others have pointed out, this is not at all unlike traditional radio. Capturing from an FM radio station probably gives you better quality.
| and then place them on peer to peer networks such as bittorrent and napster
Neither of these are presently peer-to-peer networks.
| What inevitably happens is that people will record internet radio stations all day
History tells us that this is not what inevitably happens. Nor do people spend all day scanning in library books and thus putting book publishers out of business.
| and then put all the CD quality songs up for download
| thereby harming the music industry.
Possibly, but I'd like to see more evidence that the distribution of crappy MP3s really cuts into record company sales.
Yep, that's the "statutory royalty" clause.
Basically, it's the same thing as radio broadcasters. Because it'd be impossible to accurately account for all the micropayments involved, radio stations simply make an all-covering per-listener-times-per-song (take the average number of songs per hour, multiply by hours in a month, multiply by the station's average rating) fee to an group that divides up the money. Some margin of error mistakes happen, but it's a pretty fair system.
The problem comes that the rate that OTA radio is paying per-listener-per-song is about half of what web streamed radio pays per-lister-per-song, which were the fees that came down and killed most of webstreaming. This group is now accusing the RIAA of cheating during the process that determined the fee to get a more-favorable-to-the-RIAA outcome.