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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.
He's obviously not read the regulations very carefully...
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.
There are also a whole list of regulations specifying what orders songs can't play in, how often they can play, etc.
And that's not even getting into the somewhat complicated setup with the actual music houses that collect royalties, which aren't the RIAA itself.
This guy needs to do a little more research and try again.
Unfortunately, the author is math challenged to the tune of 100x: that's actually 70 dollars per song.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
I promise you that it would cost the RIAA more to process a five thousand 7 cent checks than they'd earn in the exercise. :-)
Gee, we could go on that 24 hour news program, CNN. Uh oh. It's owned by Time Warner...
I know, we can go on National news.... oh, yeah, maybe not....
Well, there's always RADIO, but then again, I guess RIAA would take a dim view of Clear Channel doing that, and would cut them off...
Or, I know! We can use P2P to... Oh, yeah, P2P is being villified and made illegal...
(humor mode on)
Well, than it's back to what I've been saying for ages. Quit buying RIAA music, tell your friends, and ask they tell their friends. When RIAA members see their sales go down by even 30%, I suspect that they would start putting pressure on RIAA to tone it down.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Set up your streaming web server, and pick a song. Any song, preferably a long one. "Tubular Bells, Part 1" is a good choice, and runs about 24 minutes so you could play it 60 times a day. Every day.
100,000 people would probably tune in at least once, more for the novelty value than that they like Mike Oldfield's work if I'm guessing right. Then you dutifully send your check to the RIAA . . . for seven cents.
Actually, if you were into that sort of thing, you could probably run an accounting DOS on them by paying your royalties, seven cents at a time. Make sure it's a check, because those take a certain amount of work to process. Or better yet, pay by credit card, seven cents at a time. MasterVisa charges a certain amount to process a credit card transaction, and it's got to be more than seven cents. (Even if it doesn't if you do it by mail you have to have someone physically open the envelope and at least look at the letter, which takes time and money. And you would, of course want to send it by letter.)
If people really want to peeve the RIAA a certain amount of old-fashioned monkeywrenching might do the job better than an elaborate high-tech solution.
Disclaimer: This post for educational and entertainment purposes only. Do not try this at home unless you are a trained professional, and probably not even then. I will under no circumstances be liable for any monetary damage this causes you, including the seven cents you're out. Close cover before striking. Your mileage may vary. The management is not responsible.
Someone you trust is one of us.
The way it was worded, it also sets up a folder that contains an 'encrypted' cache of songs, ostensibly to ease bandwidth. This encryption involves changing the last letter of the filename. How long do you think it will take people to come out with a one button, highly illegal, program that loots this cache, providing you with an easy way to legally download lots of MP3s at 7 cents per hundred. If it takes 5 minutes, I will personally e-mail the authors and deride them for being so damn slow.
There are other benefits also, but the two you pointed out are some of the better ones. I was aiming to screw them with their own rules. Go nuts people.
-Charlie
What am I missing that makes this legal?
What you're missing is that he is proposing paying the $0.0007 fee per song they have written into law. (The fee is several times higher than radio stations pay.)
On the otherhand, you're right about pokinh holes into it. He just looked at the fee structure and ignored the other 99.44% of the law. For example the fact that the law forbids listeners the ability to select what they hear or even to know what is coming up. He also completely ignored the $2000 minimum fee per broadcaster. I doubt you could consider the entire system to be one broadcaster. It doesn't matter what the per-song fee is if each person has to pay $2000 per year.
I'm sure he trips over several other parts of the law, but those are the first two points to pop to mind.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Let's do some math. Say you have music of some sort playing most of the time during the day while you're working at your PC, either at home or at the office. To make the math easy, let's say 10 hours a day, 10 songs every hour, 25 days out of month. (this is typical for me, at least)
So.... 2500 * $0.0007 = $1.75. Let's call it two bucks, just to make things easy.
On top of that two bucks, what other fees would be involved? Let's see... if we're streaming the feeds at 64kbps, over 250 hours, I'm using 8GB of bandwidth. If we're paying, say, $0.25/GB bandwidth for broadcast, that's another two bucks per month.
So, we're already at four bucks per month, just for bandwidth and music licensing. What about the other overhead costs -- servers? Software? Sysadmin detail? Even if we're doing this in an open source fashion, our time still has value; let's say that by distributing the work amongst Free 'net community, we manage to keep it down to another two bucks of cpu/server/development/admin per user.
So, we're at six dollars per month for the ability to listen to audio webcasts. Which, by the terms of the RIAA's license agreement, means we're talking web radio here -- someone sets the playlist, and you get to listen to it. You don't get to control the feed. You *can* switch feeds, though, so you could conceivably maintain a central server list of what's playing where, and what's upcoming, and automatically hop from feed to feed -- but, that's either gonna be choppy, or you're going to have delays while you're waiting for "Lose Yourself" to start playing on JoeBob's homebrewradio after "Mmmmmbop" finishes up 17 seconds from now.
What if JoeBob decides to shut his webcast service down so he can max his framerate in Halflife2? *foop!* your song just cut out halfway through.
What if you want to listen to Pepesito Reyes' La Guantanamera, but nobody else is streaming it?
How does all the music get into the system in the first place? Or does it rely on people's own personal collections?
So... $6 per month can get a fair amount of music broadcasts, but not without a fair amount of headaches.
Contrast this with Pressplay and Rhapsody, which provide access to hundreds of thousands of songs on demand, through easily installed software, for $10 per month. Download, install, listen to whatever you want.
Are the commercial stream-on-demand services enough better to justify the extra $4/month?