Day of Silence On the Internet

A number of readers sent in stories about Net radio going dark for a day. Not all of it, but according to the Globe and Mail at least 45 stations representing thousands of channels. The stations are protesting a ruling establishing royalty rates that will put most of them out of business on July 15. "The ruling... is expected to cost large webcasters such as Yahoo and Real Networks millions of dollars, drive smaller websites like Pandora.com and Live365.com out of business and leave a large chunk of the 72 million Net radio listeners in the dark." SaveNetRadio has a page where US residents can locate their senators and representatives to call them today.

Comments

Play independent music

[jmyers]

A boycott is usually a dumb move that proves little. If they really want to make a difference they should seek out and play music by artists that are not requiring royalty payments.

Never heard of SSH tunneling?

[flyingfsck]

They can simply tunnel their broadcasts to a serrver outside the US and broadcast from there. This is a non issue caused by a lack of imagination.

This really is a non-issue.

[cstdenis]

I don't see why people get so upset about this. It really isn't a big deal. If the radio stations don't want pay the extortion rates (or shutdown because they can't afford them) all they have to do is move to another country. IANAL, but its not that hard to incorporate in another country. All they have to do is start a Canadian corporation or something and run it from there. If they can afford the old rates they can afford the few thousand to incorporate in another country. There is no reason this should have any effect other than hurting the US economy a bit since they will now be getting no royalties instead of the smaller ones.