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Internet Radio Will Go Silent on June 26th
Spamicles writes "Thousands of U.S. webcasters plan to turn off the music and go silent this Tuesday, June 26th, to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that, if implemented, would lead to the virtual shutdown of this country's Internet radio industry. In March, the Copyright Royalty Board announced that it would raise royalties for Internet broadcasters, moving them from a per-song rate to a per-listener rate. The increase would be made retroactive to the beginning of 2006 and would double over the next five years. Internet radio sites would be charged per performance of a song. A "performance" is defined as the streaming of one song to one listener; thus a station that has an average audience of 500 listeners racks up 500 "performances" for each song it plays."
I'm not even in the music industry, but I'll be shutting down my web site (w/a notice explaining why & a link if someone has one) on that day to bring awareness to this issue.
Or would that be disallowed completely, even if the person wasn't broadcasting any music that they might have say over?
Exactly. Soundexchange gets paid even for non-member music. The law says that if you can't pay them, you don't play the music.
Now, there is one thing though, Soundexchange is required to allow artists and radio stations to contract directly and individually and is required to track all of these individual contracts so that they don't bill for those recordings. As creative commons grows, we might have a bit of a weapon to fight back with, if on our end we set up something more-or-less automatic for creating those contracts, it may turn out that we can swamp Soundexchange with them if they haven't already automated their end of the deal. If we can, and Soundexchange fails to keep up their end of the law, since they are "deputized" to operate the law, their failure might be prosecutable as malfeasance (if you can convince the Department of Justice to care about corporations), especially if it can be shown that at some step of the way they intentionally refused a contract or knowingly billed for a contracted performance.