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Internet Radio May Stream North to Canada
An anonymous reader writes "With U.S. copyright royalties threatening to kill Internet radio in the U.S., Michael Geist explains why webcasters considering a move to Canada will find that the legal framework for Internet radio trades costs for complexity. There are two main areas of concern from a Canadian perspective — broadcast regulation and copyright fees. The broadcast side is surprisingly regulation-free, but there are at least three Canadian copyright collectives lining up to collect from Internet radio stations."
My internet radio station will be broadcasting from Nigeria... just think of the fund-raising possibilities!
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
One of my favorite internet stations is Industrial/Techno http://ebm-radio.de/ and is hosted out of Germany. I would suspect they have little RIAA music as it is, but couldn't you just find a hosting company in another nation? Sweeden perhaps?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
About 3 years ago the shoutcast stream i'm affiliated with ETN.FM moved everything up to Canada, and got ourselves declared as a not for profit organization. Since this is just a hobby and no one is making cash from it, it afforded us a greater ammount of legal protection than we could ever hope to receive inside the US. There was some problems gaining the non-profit status, but it wasn't too difficult.
Moving to Canada, an offshore rig or Timbuktu is not a solution.
Let's stop this madness.
Write your Congressional representative.
Save the Streams.
What? Regulation free? Haven't the Commission for Regulations and Thought Control got anything to say on this matter? Will Americans be happy with receiving minimum Canadian content? Well, I guess they were kind enough to liberate us of Celine Dion (big thanks there guys, it was an honourable sacrifice).
...There are two main areas of concern from a Canadian perspective -- broadcast regulation and copyright fees. The broadcast side is surprisingly regulation-free ...
Actually it's quite unregulated because the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) chose to not regulate Internet broadcasting... back in 1999.
Then again, we're also allowed to say "fuck" on the radio, unlike our American cousins....
Three Squirrels
I'm a webcaster from Alaska, you insensitive clod.
Actually, it's a sliding scale depending on the genre. While jazz and classical might have to keep over 40% of the content Canadian, pseudo-American pop music by Canadian artists need take up only 25% of the valuable airtime otheriwse devoted to truly American pop pseudo-music.
Ahem.
Avante-garde Brazilian elevator music, to take another example, has a special exemption that requires only 2% of the material aired be produced or mixed in Canada. John Cage performances are required to have only an 8% Canadian quality to the street noise that fills in the silences.
Also, for some reason, Hip Hop from Quebec counts.
These stories are free but worth money.
SOCAN and other such organizations take a lot of heat from the digital-anarchy types for collecting performance royalties on behalf of artists. One needs to remember that performance-rights organizations aren't necessarily affiliated with record companies. They're operating on behalf of the artists themselves.
We'd all like to live in a society where culture is free and ubiquitous. Squeezing greedy record companies out of the equation with modern technology is a no-brainer. But let's not forget that organizations like SOCAN are what allow artists to support themselves. Without the revenues that royalties provide, artists can't support themselves. Personally, I'm more they're likely to find a job riding a desk than to "starve for my art".
Someone has to pay for art, and that someone is all of us who enjoy it.
We could call it "YouPod". And Google could buy it for a billion dollars. And dollar-for-dollar, lawyer-for-lawyer, the YouTube DMCA lawsuit is a fair fight.
The problem is that after Google wins the YouTube/DMCA battle, the MAFIAA will simply buy a new law, DMCA2, on the grounds that the DMCA is obsolete.
They've actually got some factual ground there -- back in the pre-DMCA era, when hosting content cost a small fortune (why, you needed actual server space and a whole megabit of bandwidth, not just that 486 running Windows NT on a 128K ISDN link), getting your account/website nuked from your ISP was a pretty big deterrent. Today, of course, you can find bigger servers in the dumpster, and broadband is ubiquitous.
So after the safe harbor provisions are upheld and Google/Youtube are triumphant, Viacom will slink off to buy DMCA-2. DMCA-2 will be the same as DMCA, but without the safe harbor provisions for service providers. Dollar-for-dollar, the participants are evenly matched, but lobbying isn't only about dollars, it's about personal contacts, and Google doesn't have the lobbyist infrastructure in place to counter MAFIAA on their home turf.
If only you RTFA you would know that internet only radio stations are exempt from Canadian content minimums.
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I'm too lazy to read TFA, but the summary says that to escape royalties companies will flee north, where the only problem is the royalties?
Viva el Mexico!
That's a bad idea. The stream will just freeze and then they'll play hockey on it.
However, a move is something altogether different. Y'see, taxes ARE cold, hard cash. And all those listeners who aren't listening to the commercial stations' advertising? They ARE collective power. No listeners, no advertising revenue, no commercial stations.
(In England, pirate radio eventually forced the Government to license independent stations for the same reason. People defected in far too large numbers to the likes of Stockports' KFM and the monopoly crumbled from a lack of listeners. Protests never made a difference for the same reason they won't with Internet Radio. The people who need to protest most have made their voice willfully the weakest. It won't get heard. The chink of money, however quiet, will be. A politician can hear a cent coin falling on cotton candy from a thousand paces. Moving is the only voice left. If you don't use that, you've nothing left at all.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This is tagged 'blamecanada' yet most of this shit originates from the USA. I'm living/from the USA, WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE REST OF YOU SMOKING? Do you fuckers need a clue-by-four upside your fucking hypocritical heads?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So what's to stop the radio stations from relocating in another country? What do you lose? Ok it's ashame that college kids and hackers won't be able to run their own *live* radio shows but as long as somebody's got a station set up surely you'll be able to pipe them some content? This here new fangled internet thing works further than you can shout you know. In the same way that here in the UK pirate radio stations moved onto ships and moored outside British waters and broadcast from there, why not just move your stations out to Europe/ New Zealand/ Oz/ Timbuctu?
The real upshot of all this is... I give up. "They" win. My station will never stream again.
Truth is, everyone can sign all the petitions they want, send all the letters to Congress that they want, but at the end of the day it's still David & Goliath. And I don't like those odds, regardless of how that first David did. I just ran a radio station as a hobby, and it got damned popular for a small-scale, self-financed project. But it's over-regulated and too expensive now.
Fight "the man" you say? Why bother? I don't have the resources or time to do that. It was a fun hobby, that's all. Someone with money and power wants to kill my hobby? Let 'em have it. I've got better things to do with my time, and I damn sure have better things to do with my money. Let someone else fight it.
Stream indie content? Not my bag, man. Besides, there's lots of that already happening. Nobody streamed the content I had solely in the format I programmed - 50's & 60's oldies & nothing else. Groundbreaking? No, but fun? Oh, yeah. But it ain't as much fun as these fees and regulations. Keep it, I quit.
That's what's going to happen to internet radio.
It was fun while it lasted. RIP, RockDoggy Radio.