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How to Legally Infuriate the RIAA?
An anonymous reader shot us off a link to an article discussing how to use the RIAA's System to Broadcast Music Legally. Now, I'm no lawyer, but if the facts are correct in this article, we're talking about a price point that makes streaming radio extremely inexpensive. There's a lot of worthless spite in this article, but if you can look past that, you might see something worth thinking about.
Only problem is the guy who wrote this blatantly has no idea how statistics work. There's about 300'000'000 ppl in the US. If the odds for someone of being "trampled by a herd of zebra above the Arctic Circle, while being hit by a meteor and lightning" were 1 in 10'000 (say per year, but you can adapt this to any period of time), the odds would of course increase as you go south - so they would be even greater (read 10'000 gets smaller) in the US. Imagine they stayed the same. This would mean that every year 30'000 people would get "trampled by a herd of zebra, while being hit by a meteor and lightning". Obviously completely stupid. The odds of all these things happening at the same time are much, much smaller than 1 in 10'000.
So basically, the author of the article needs to go back to secondary school and learn some basic maths. The odds of getting snuffed by the RIAA are pretty significant. 1 in 10'000, given 35 million file swappers, would mean that about 3'500 will get caught, put in prison, fined large amounts of money. And the ones who are most likely to be caught are, sadly, the ones sharing the most music (logically). The conclusions seem pretty straightforward, and unfortunately are not good for file-sharing.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
.07 CENTS. IE: 7/10th's of a cent. So, yeah, 7000 cents, I get $70 dollars.
The Register also has an article on webcasting and the RIAA. The two articles together show how webcasting may be the RIAA's Achilles heel.
He links to the rules regarding royalties, but the method violates virtually every regulation governing webcasts:
1 4
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#1
The church of the RIAA gets it't tithe of $0.007 per song streamed. Now if we do the math(Not that I like math).
43200 Minutes a month
3 Three Minute songs on average.
14400 Songs streamed per month.
100.8 bucks paid per month
That will give you the ability to stream to one person a single file for an entire month.
What he is getting at is to create some software to make use of this setup. So while you are listing to music you are also serving it out, thus nullifing your per song obligation. Meanwhile you pay a monthly fee that will be rolled back to the network and used to pay the RIAA tithe.
And all will be happy, and stinkiness will be purged from denmark.
Fscking with MP3's on the users hard disk is a side effect. (Like throwing a bone to a dog (Bitchas of the RIAA)
no current internet radio software allows you to pick the songs you want to hear
False.
It is called Otto.
SPAM
Actually that's what this XM station is all about. People vote for their favorite songs (online or on the phone) and the top 20 are played. Then the votes are counted again and a new playlist is generated.
And $0.0007 * 100000 = $70, which means literally "seventy dollars", not "seventy cents."
There were a few things that were edited out of the origional, and a few things that should have been, but weren't. First, thanks for the complement, I was giggling my ass of when I thought of that.
:)
As for the stuff cut, there was a link on Mussolini dying that doesn't take much to guess the contents of, and a proposed one to the editorial policies that I will save for another day.
Additionally, I found out the use of the phrase of P*gF*ck*rs gets censored on the Inq.
I didn't mind any of these changes though, some I expected, others I agreed to.
-Charlie
(yes, I wrote the origional)
.07 cents * 10,000 = 700 cents, which is $7.
There are others in the linked text, and in the law itself.
It uses a loophole in the law to pay them a lot less than what they want ($1 per month per user for unlimited downloads, rather than $17 per user per CD), and there's nothing they can legally do about it, unless they change the law that they themselves lobbied for. Plus, it takes control of distribution away from the RIAA and puts it in the hands of the users. That's what will really infuriate them.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are not necessarily my own, as I've not yet had my medication today.
That is basically the point. The RIAA would think it is theft, but it most likely technically lives up to the letter of the law. The hope was that any brain dead monkey could go in, copy the files, and have an MP3 collection from it. *THAT* would be illegal though, but the company has nothing to do with it, and frowns on cache tampering, just look, it is in their terms of use. :)
-Charlie (The articles author)
There is MTV2's control freak. (OK this is tv)
Yes, and as such the content is already licensed under a negotiated license.
Radio@Netscape Plus has CD listeing parties and some songs are on a VERY heavy rotation
Maybe they have a license. Maybe they're breaking the law. I bet if the RIAA found out about it they'd send a cease and desist.
launch.yahoo.com - Lets me view "any videos" of my choosing in their catalog.
Again, videos are not covered by the statutory license. So I'd bet that yahoo has a negotiated license with the copyright holders.
netscape or something similar also has CD listening parties.
You said that one twice, right? What is the selection like? My quick look at the site seems to suggest that it's extremely limited. If so, I'd bet they have a negotiated license. Remember, you only need to follow these rules to get the statutory license. If you get permission of the copyright holders, you can do anything you want.
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges .07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
It's seventy DOLLARS per song.
100000 listeners * .07 cents = 7000 cents.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
You're getting hung up on the details, and not understanding them.
.07 cents per download. Basically, it's a P2P system in a radio stations clothing.
What he's describing is little more than Kazaa, but with an accounting feature that will track file dowloads and pay the RIAA
This way file sharing would be charged at the same rate that radio stations do.
Check out LaunchCast
They've been doing this for several years now (create a personal radio station). They get by the rules that which "explicitly prevent radio stations from doing things like allowing listeners to democratically select which songs to play" by letting listeners rate music, which performs two tasks: 1) a rather TiVo like function, using your ratings to find new music you might also like and 2) to help decide what songs you get to listen to. Note that listeners aren't saying "I'd like to hear song X next." Instead, listeners are simply showing preference for a song, artist, album, genre, or other member's preferences. The best feature is the "Red X" option, to ban a song, artist, or album from your station. It's quite swank. Best of all, it's free for basic service, and an actually reasonable subscription for enhanced features.
This comment was not generated by Uber Elephants...
Uhm, but see, if you send them a check for 7 cents, they'll send you a bill for the other 199,993 cents. And if you feel particularly inclined to spend the time and money to divide that $2,000 fee into 28,572 seperate checks, you probably have enough time and money to do something effective with it, like lobbying congress or contributing to the EFF.