Slashdot Mirror
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.
Internet "radio" stations were enticing listeners with content (music, largely), which the content's owners did not license for such use.
Slashdot, being what it is, is always happy to "stick it" to the owners of anything worth stealing, so there is a lot of sympathy towards these businesses.
Watch this thread deteriorate into the "piracy is not exactly stealing, therefore there is nothing wrong with it" obfuscation and muddying.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.