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."

Comments

RIAA Sues Radio Stations for Giving Away Music

[Khakionion]

It's about time. The subject line refers to an article on The Onion about RIAA's intolerance for FM radio stations giving away music. Unfortunately, it is a very real problem here on the Internet. Hopefully this, in conjunction with the backlash noted on The Register today (it's on Slashdot's "Register" sidebar), even Joe Sixpack will wake up to the RIAA's ridiculous behavior.

Bout Time

[Izago909]

It's about damn time. They should have been stopped when they extorted royalties from webcasters who would never play any pop filth that they 'represent'. Why should someone have to pay royalties to a body that doesn't hold any of the rights to the content that's being played?

SomaFM forever!!

Re:Bout Time

[Qzukk]

Can you substantiate this claim?

Easily done. The law that enforces the royalties on streaming music (originally CARP, now the Small Webcaster Settlement Act) declares that Soundexchange (A division of the RIAA) to be the official receiver and distributor for all noninteractive digital performance royalties (from their FAQ).

What I would like to see would be for some small bands to set up their own streams, pay Soundexchange their $500 minimum yearly royalty, then sue Soundforge in small claims court, if Soundforge refuses to pay the full $500 back. In the absence of a contract permitting Soundexchange to keep any of the money, there is no reasonable expectation that any of that money belongs to Soundexchange.

From those judgements against soundexchange (maybe if enough showed up, a class action suit could be had?), it would be interesting to see where it could go next... perhaps some kind of action against them being the Royal Royalty Collector since they have been shown (by the lawsuits) to be behaving in bad faith, and that an independent company should be responsbile for royalty distribution.

Besides reading slashdot...

[Dumbush]

Is there anything we can do to help Wedcaster Alliance on this case

Sherman Anti-Trust Act Nothing

[MBCook]

Sherman Anti-Trust Act nothing, I bet it wouldn't be that hard to come up with a RICO complaint against them. They sure sound like they're about to cross the edge to me. Do what we tell you (don't download stuff) or we'll make you regret it (erase your hard drive) sure sounds like racateering to me. Do they do anything to try to stop indie lables? If you can't make a RICO complaint against them now, at the rate they're going, I can't help but wonder how long it will be before they do qualify.

The grand plan

[DigiShaman]

The grand plan in the current music industry is to condition people over many generations to a specific..managible genre of music. AKA SPAM-IN-CAN CorpRock Musak. It makes perfect marketing sense. If you can manage and control what users listen to, then you can better predict your profit margins. Ever notice how all the "Alternative" music sounds the same of the past 15 years? Utter crap. And to add more salt to the wound, there is even talk in the industry to scientifically figure out what waveforms people like...err I mean music for even better corp-rock crap

Re:The grand plan

[DeltaSigma]

Underground subcultures are very much aware of this situation. It's generally regarded as a hostile act meant to destroy our culture.

Allow me to explain. Sometimes a government body's political boundries encompass two very different cultures. In a case where a smaller culture is regarded as a potential threat, problem, or nuisance the government may attempt to breed them out of existance. Sort of a peaceful genocide, it's quite simple. Noone gets killed, noone's locked up, or harmed in any way. However the government creates incentives for businesses to set up in this particular area of the country. Thus the mainstream population moves to this area in pursuit of jobs. Over the years the two cultures interbreed until the differences that once seperated the two cultures are spread so thin that, for all intensive purposes, that culture no longer exists. This is a very real problem that anthropologists are constantly attempting to combat.

The recording industry, or at least the RIAA, is attempting to do the same thing. They're taking mainstream music, tweaked to sound more punk, metal, gothic, hip-hop or what have you. In the mainstreams pursuit to be an "inDUHvidual" they cling to this facade and claim to be what we are. Over time start-up bands attempt to imitate these fake bands, the media begins to depict this coincidentally (hah) more media-friendly subculture as the true subculture, and over time what we really are and what we're really about is lost in the stream of time.

For the most part, we've lost punk to this crap already. Oh don't get me wrong I'm sure there's still a few bands and a few isolated groups which fit the original ( and political ) description of punk. However most of the punks I knew became disheartened. Their clothes, music, literature, EVERYTHING, became very difficult to find amidst this mainstream regurgitation.

Metal's suffering from the same onslaught as we speak. Nu-Metal threatens to destroy another subculture very near and dear to me in time.

My subculture sees the beginnings of the same thing for us. On the gothic front, the media appears to have chosen a multi-faceted attack with television and the popularization (helped along with a little advertising) of dark television series. Buffy was a very good example. Fashion's a little less hard to pick apart amidst the season's change of fashion obsessions so I won't speak of any direct threat there. Honestly I doubt I could pick those things out if I tried. And, though it seems to have taken them a while, I've heard the RIAA finally has a band calling themselves "gothic" that they're parading around MTV.

Some might be happy to be rid of us. Indeed there's a great many selfish people who can't see beyond their own form of living. To these people I would express my regret that they could not understand what we are. We're nothing more than a culture which holds valuable its traditions and similarities. By departing from mainstream into the gothic subculture I've learned a lot about society. And despite what mainstream sources will tell you, goths, punks, metal-heads, rivet-heads, etc., are NOT anti-cultures. That is to say, we're don't join the groups we do because we oppose mainstream in its entirety. Rather, we join these groups as they better fit our lifestyle. It was easier for me to make friends amongst goths than it was at random.

In any event, here's how it relates to you, the reader, if you're not part of a subculture. I mean, if you're totally mainstream this isn't going to hurt you. Are you christian though? Do you like christian music? Yeah, that won't survive if the RIAA gets its way. Actually anything that mainstream, pop/rock advertising doesn't cover will eventually be destroyed if things continue as they have been.

If you've ever liked something besides pop/rock, I reccomend you invest a bit more in ANY alternative source of music. Be it web distribution, independant labels, classic radio stations, whatever. Support everything that isn't mainstream.

Where do i send my donations?

[stang7423]

The RIAA has gotten out of control. This suit looks like ond of the best counter attacks that has been launched against the RIAA. Now I want to give some of my hard earned money that would have otherwise (according to the RIAA) gone for recorded music to help support the legal fees of their oppostion.

Re:Commercial vs Non Commercial Radio Stations

[Elwood P Dowd]

There are specific laws for webcasting that are different from those regarding radio broadcasts.

Why should there be different laws? Otherwise, it would be too cheap to run a webcast! There would be so many different webcasters that advertisers would never know which market was listening to which stations, and labels would have no way to ensure that their product was adequately represented. Mass hysteria! Dogs and cats living together!

I'm not exaggerating. That's actually the reason. Congress just wanted to bring about "market consolidation."

ClearChannel only webcasting.

Re:Bulshit

[AlaskanUnderachiever]

More importantly, they're the most anal retentive paperwork carrying of any broadcaster out there. Try to escape fees and you're going to have to be able to sit down and show EVERY song you played since you went "independent". I should know I worked for one. We had an entire room that was devoted to nothing BUT proving we were 100% legal. Yes you can do it, but you better be prepared to not only fight but have the ammo to figh in the first place.

Re:Bulshit

[LostCluster]

The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here. If they want to play music from unsigned artists, they can. And if they would sign those artists to contracts before the RIAA gets to them, granting them rights to play given works no matter what, then the RIAA couldn't even prevent it after they signed the artists.

You missed something here. Signing such a contract giving rights to play to your early recordings before signing an RIAA contract just doesn't happen. Because signing such a deal makes it certain that an RIAA contract isn't coming your way. If you try to promote yourself the RIAA's system, then the RIAA's system will see to it that they are closed to you. Any radio station that plays even a small ammount non-RIAA music is punished by non-access. They'll find whatever artist is hot at the moment in their section of music all over the closest station in format to them in their area. It becomes very hard to compete when your opponent has all of the major artist exclusives such as interviews and local-premire songs and you don't.

The broadcasters, like you, have no argument here.
I'm a broadcaster? I didn't know that...

But the artists aren't going to do that because they see the RIAA as the master of the market, and lawsuits like these only perpeptuate that control.
Hold on, did you RFTA? The RIAA isn't suing webcasters, a group of webcasters are suing the RIAA for anti-competitive behavior during the legal process that set the webcasting rates because they presented an agreement between the RIAA and the a group "representing the webcasting industry" that didn't include any representation for them, yet they're bound by this statutory price too. They're basically accusing the RIAA of cheating Microsoft-style.