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.

Comments

Re:Odds of being trampled on by zebras ?

[KDan]

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

Register's referrence

[SoSueMe]

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.

Ridiculous

[theNote]

He links to the rules regarding royalties, but the method violates virtually every regulation governing webcasts:

http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#11 4

There is software

[BlueTooth]

no current internet radio software allows you to pick the songs you want to hear

False.

It is called Otto.

Re:Not a chance...

[Therlin]

Among other places where this scheme is legally questionable, the rules explicitly prevent radio stations from doing things like allowing listeners to democratically select which songs to play

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.

Re:Not a chance...

[anthony_dipierro]

Here are some details:

• No interactivity - Program can not be created for the user. Requested songs not played within the hour or at a specified time.
• No more than 3 songs in a two hour period from the same album/CD
• No more than 4 songs in a two hour period from the same artist or box set
• No advance notice (published) of music, unless the format is classical and you have a history, prior to 1998 of doing it.
• Archived programs must be at least 5 hours long and not available for more than 2 weeks.
• Webcasters can't allow user, if feasible, from scanning for a particular song.
• Webcasters can't encourage users to copy/record music. If webcasters use a system that helps to prevent recording of the webcast, webcasters must enable the copy prevention option.

There are others in the linked text, and in the law itself.