U.S. Court Denies Webcasters' Stay Petition

Michael Manoochehri writes "Reuters reports that a "federal appeals court has denied a petition by U.S. Internet radio stations seeking to delay a royalty rate hike due July 15 they say could kill the fledgling industry." This royalty rate hike, put forth by the US Copyright Royalty Board, will increase royalty rates for webcast music tremendously, in some cases to more per year than many webcasters bring in from revenue. Save Net Radio, a coalition of webcasters, is telling listeners that "We are appealing to the millions of Internet radio listeners out there, the webcasters they support and the artists and labels we treasure to rise up and make your voices heard again before this vibrant medium is silenced.""

Comments

Killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

[Agent Green]

I don't think congress is going to fix this tomorrow ... so the RIAA should get what they deserve and lose all their royalties altogether.

Fuck 'em. I expect everyone has had enough of their shit.

It's just too bad that all the honest people in this new business are going to have to suffer for it.

Re:Killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a good thing. Please bear with me....

Look, the goose is already cooked. Let's face it, the MAFIAA have all but completely destroyed the recording industry. I remember saying
in a post on this site maybe 7 or 8 years ago that they would ultimately destroy the industry rather than give up control.
Putting all the internet radio stations out of business is a scorched earth move, merely a spiteful parting gesture from a walking corpse.

Let them do it.

Let them use their sweaty, mean spirited little pencil pushing lawyers to take their ball and go home.

Nothing short of this will precipitate the revolution that is needed in the media, and it starts with the smallest independent
broadcasters.

You think these businesses will roll over and disappear without a fight? No way, they will merely adapt to circumstance.
The MAFIAA work by creating a false scarcity of content. In reality there is a glut of high quality Free content out there, millions
of musicians and podcasters who have had a decade to become highly skilled content producers are just waiting for the death of Big Media so that their work can become valuable. The myth of "artists need to be paid" has been so completely destroyed only fools cling to it. Everybody knows (to quote Mr Cohen) how crooked the game is, that artists never get paid properly anyway, and that all the ones who have any merit produce because they
want to and would do so even without an audience. Once the MAFIAA skulk off home to mommy taking their hyped manufactured rubbish with them there's gonna be an explosion of new talent, new voices, fresh political commentators and documentary, new celebrity.... It's ripe to happen, simple supply and demand. There is a vast reservoir of supply, and now the demand is about to kick in. I hope to God they pass this law, because it will be the death of the bastards. Once mainstream radio and TV get a sniff of how internet stations are surviving by bypassing corporate controlled material they will want a piece too. And thus the whole filthy mess begins to unwind....

Re:Killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

[onion_joe]

I get an inappropriate sense of glee when I tell clients that they can't do this or that or they have to spend x^2 dollars to make something obvious happen because of DRM issues.

eg.: Windows Media Center will not stream from a server to a client laptop. You can buy an xbox and a "media extender" but that removes any mobile functionality (unless you want to lug a DC->AC inverter and battery pack with you, or appropriate DC mobile power supply.)

So what am I doing now? Setting up a test box with MythTV.

I think the inappropriate feelings stem from watching non-standard and poorly implemented DRM wreaking havoc on MS/RIAA/MPAA customer loyalty.

A previous post mentioned, "shooting oneself in the foot." Fine by me. I sell OSS every chance I get. It's only us hard-core gamers that need MS [for the time being.]

-OJ

Re:Killing the goose that lays the golden egg.

[quag7]

Yeah well, every third person I meet claims that they're a "musician." So some slackers might have to get actual jobs and actually work for a living. I do not care. I look forward to the day Avril Lavigne takes my order for a cheeseburger. Musicians and artists tend to have an extremely high self-opinion in terms of what they think they contribute to "culture." John Coltrane contributed to culture. The world would not be significantly different, however, if the last ten years in top 40 music had never happened.

Where's the rock style life for the people who build bridges and clean up bathrooms? Where's the rock star life for teachers who contribute something directly measurable to our civilization? Where's the free booze and blowjobs for activists, community organizers, and people manning the soup kitchens tonight?

And for that matter, where's the rock star life for the countless musicians in less lucrative genres like jazz or folk music? Some of the most mindblowing music I've ever heard was hardcore jazz played furiously with wild abandon on snowy nights in hole-in-the-wall bars in towns and cities you haven't heard of by amateurs who had no chance in hell of ever making a living at it even in an ideal intellectual property/copyright environment.

What this all may portend is the end of the corporate-generated rock star and frankly, I couldn't welcome it more.

I have no solution to the problem of stolen demos and studio tapes; that's just wrong. But if that problem can somehow be addressed - possibly by home studios - artists should record albums and then set a bounty and collect money for it online, bypassing record labels completely. When the predetermined threshold is reached, the album gets released on the internet, with the expectation that from then on it becomes a promotional tool for the next album or tour, because there is simply no way you can stop music piracy. The question of "what to do about piracy" is moot. You set a bounty - say, a million dollars. When enough contributions come in to total a million dollars, the album is published on the web, free for anyone to download. In theory, all of the money would go to the artists, minus IT/financial fees.

This plan is interesting to me because what it means is, Bob Dylan fans (for example) pay money to the bounty fund for Bob's next album. When that album is released, it is then, for all practical purposes, free. This allows fans and advocates to contribute money to what they like, and it acts as a sort of gift to the rest of the world to spread the music they like. Beyond this, the suits are cut out of the equation, as they should be, because with the internet, all of the supposed value they add (promotion and distribution) has diminished significantly. If music were free, it would be promoted by blogs and file sharing services.

But then music would have to rely on its own merit, rather than street teams and tastemakers telling the dumbest of us what we like.

By setting a bounty, we ensure the artist gets paid. 50 years from now, there is no question whether a music file being passed around on the internet from today was "stolen." Its very existence would indicate that a bounty was met.

For visual entertainment that is not exhibited in theaters (which is an experience that piracy cannot easily duplicate), a similar model could be used.

I'm sure this scheme has problems but the old way of doing things, where you go to the store and you buy something but don't own it - itself a weird concept, really - is simply irrelevant now. The question is not what to do about piracy; the question is how to incorporate the reality of the free flow of data in a global, electronically connected world, with the need to make a living.

The old saw about how the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it applies and can be extended here:

The internet interprets copyrights and patents as damage, and routes around it.

The world has changed. Whether this ticks people off or not is increasingly irrelevant, and no - I don't have to be a professional musician myself to make this statement. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

Re:What, you're shocked?

[popo]

"Whoever has deeper pockets wins."
--------

Not true. (Let's call your argument the "neo con" argument.)

The people who actually win are the people who can't be controlled.

(We'll call that the "Iraqi" argument.)

Internet Radio will morph into P2P streaming and offshore stations. It's not going anywhere.

The only thing that's going away is the last hopes the record labels had to profit from it.

Foot, meet bullet. Information wants to be free.

That is the funny part

[WindBourne]

Politicians have NOT killed the golden goose. They have made it safe for large business and only for them. Look, the last time this came up, I suggested that these stations play groups that are not associated with the RIAA. Apparently, the RIAA gets to collect it wether the group is signed up or not. Amazingly, the group gets to KEEP that money until the music group signs up with them. And they do not have to pay interest. That means that congress has given RIAA a monopoly. In addition, they have eliminated the competition for the broadcasters, by pricing it too much for the little guy to pay. But where are you going to go? Streams from another nation? W. is running around trying to kill them all off.

The only way that I can see this happening is if the muscian's OWN the stream site that plays them. Imagine a site that is devoted to the 90's, might get 10 groups (from the 90's) to BUY into them. 1 share each. They pay the musicians the old rate. As time progresses, they would get more groups to buy into them. I think that it is possible that the company could even allow other groups to own them or perhaps buy into them. Just 1 share. I think that is all it would take. Any lawyers out there? Tear this apart.

Re:What, you're overseas?

[PMBjornerud]

As for the first, I don't think P2P was made for the kind of streaming that stations do. However, it would be extremely useful to have a local "cache" of the last 50 songs played on radio. Really liked that previous song? Just drag it into your portable music player and go. That tune they played 30 minutes ago stuck in your mind? Just click and play it again.

Such a cache would obviously be illegal. But convenient for the users, and it would mean that most listeners on any channel/playlist/tag would have a large selection of the typical songs. There is some synergy, so I would not discard the possibility of someone coming up with a clever protocol for doing something like this.

Hm... Such a program would actually download and share music without you telling it which songs to download. Nasty.

Actually, terrestrial radio may be next...

[Abcd1234]

Actually, what's really interesting about this whole situation is that, from what I understand, they plan to go after terrestrial radio next. To quote:

Where webcasters and the recording industry do agree is on the unfairness of making tiny Web stations pay for performance rights while huge radio companies pay nothing. Congress decided that Web stations must pay royalties to the composers of each song and to the performers and record labels, even as traditional AM and FM broadcasters continue paying only the composers -- a quirk in the law that gives broadcast radio a huge advantage.

Simson agrees that "there's really no justification for broadcast radio not paying, and we're going to try to address that."

Yeah... they really are that crazy.

They're doing this to kill independent bands

[i_b_don]

So you have to ask the question "why?"

Soundexchange and the RIAA both know that this will kill off 99% of net radio, so why are they doing it? IMHO the reason is that they want to keep independent bands in check. if indies had a good place to be heard and become known without going through their slimy hands then that's scary thing for them. If you can limit the amount of stations that play music then you can limit everyone's choices to a few classically popular bands that are already signed to the big labels.

That's the same behavior you get from radio broadcasting now a days. Time is valuable and so you can only play the bands that are "popular". if you can't aim at a niche audience then you have to be broad and boring. I'm sure the through of democratizing our listening habits scares the crap out of the big labels. This is just a means of using ancient laws to prop up the current paradigm that much longer.

d

Re:The RIAA dosen't care about the money.

[wytcld]

when record-making equipment was expensive, they used that

Not the case. Back in the early days record-making equipment was quite cheap. There were myriad small, local labels across the country, tied to local music scenes. This continued through the mid-50s, when the business started to consolidate due to better national promotion and distribution of former local stars like Elvis Presley, including payola to the formerly-locally-oriented radio stations to induce them to favor the nationally-marketed stars. Radio in the early era had been based largely on live broadcasts, since the fidelity was better (and live music has other virtues), out of the major cities and big regional stations (shows like the King Biscuit Flour Hour down in the Delta).

As recording studio technology developed from the late 50s onward, studio time became expensive, leading to the current system where artists get signed to labels which then lend them money for their time in the studio to record. It usually turns out that the seemingly generous offers get totally absorbed by studio costs, and the musicians get nothing. That's not too different from back in the early days, when musicians got a small fee per song recorded, and nothing at all no matter how many records sold. Musicians made most all their money from live performance - just like today.

What the record industry is trying to control here is the ability of small, independent musicians to gain any audience at all - the kind of musicians the commercial radio stations and even satellite radio will never play. They're trying to assure that real art doesn't distract from their marketing of sex and violence dressed up as music. Any politician concerned with the state of our mass culture should recognize that the degeneracy is largely a corporate product. So anything that decreases the power of these corporations by allowing more real art to flourish in spaces they can't control is key to restoring health to popular (and less-popular) culture.

Politicians - bewailing the media while furthering its monopoly. In terms of the longer-term success of our nation, this is worse than Iraq - indeed without this, Iraq could never have been sold.