How can a law that specifically exempts something be considered a "historical accident"? Because copyright is a government granted monopoly, the lawmakers wanted to put some limitations on that monopoly, hence they created fair use and other exemptions - including exemptions for radio broadcasters.
The "historical accident" line, which the RIAA repeats over and over, is bullshit.
One of the problems of listener metrics on Podcasts is that you don't know who is listening (or how many times), you only know how many times they download the 'cast, or how many people subscribe to your feed.
Do you really only subscribe to podcasts you listen to? I know I've had several podcasts that I forgot to unsub from and they keep on downloading... even though I never listen to them. (Eventually I remembered to unsub).
``Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.``
Practically speaking, I don't have to have RIAA permission to put stuff on my iPod.
Playback will use a lot of battery, the high quality codecs like aacPlus use a lot of CPU power to decode. MP3 and AAC-LC (i.e. normal AAC) are a lot easier to decode and hence use less horsepower. AAC-HE (aka aacPlus) is effectively synthesizing the high end of the spectrum and that takes a lot of horsepower.
The OQO has very good linux support (albeit officially unsupported), available from their FTP site. I recall seeing the lead developer's email address posted as well, for bug reporting and such.
Do you think Virgin has their own towers, or MetroPCS or the other MVNOs? No, they lease airtime from others (Sprint in the case of MetroPCS and Virgin).
MVNOs provide the customer service, pick the offerings, choose the phones to support, and sell the service. The towers are operated by established players.
It's kind of like Earthlink selling SBC DSL under their own name, with their own additional features.
As a "Computer Nut" I do the Airport Express solution now. It's not perfect, and strongly lacking in some ways:
- With the Airport Express you don't get a nice GUI or remote control device.
- With the Airport Express, you can't play the same music in multiple rooms at once.
- You also have to have a computer running. I'm told the Sonus will play interenet radio without requiring a computer or file server running. (Roku does this as well, and apparently the new Slim Devices product does as well)
Sonus is too expensive now, but the price should come down.
As a HiFi enthusiast I don't care that it only a lame 50 watt amp, I'll use the line level outs to drive powered speakers, because active speakers sound better. (Why send audio over high current AC over big thick cables when you could put the amp in the speaker?)
An Idiot with Too Much Money(tm) probably has in-wall speakers and won't buy them from Sonus anyway.
I wasn't speaking about WiFi specifically, I was thinking more about WiMax which is designed to serve tons of customers at the same time, or wireless phones.
For popular programming, IP multicasting is effectively broadcasting over IP networks. Multicasting hasn't taken off big on the internet because of issues relating to ISP peering and routing protocol standards. However, universities and large corporations are using Multicast to deliver real time video to thousands of desktops at the same time.
But you're right, for large scale mass media, a satellite broadcast makes a lot of sense (except in areas where the sat can't be received well - e.g. office buildings). But for larger amounts of niche programming (there are well over 10,000 internet radio stations now) the bandwidth isn't there for satellite services to be broadcasting all of them all the time.
Nope, it wasn't an engineering choice, it's all about licensing and competing for spectrum. There always competition for bandwidth, and Satellite frequencies have to be shared with other services, terrestrial and in orbit. And a satellite can't broadcast on frequencies used terrestrially.
In the last round of negotiating for spectrum, 25mhz was allocated for SDARS (satellite digital audio radio services). Originally it was going to be much more, but congress decided to order the FCC to allocate/auction a lot of that bandwidth to terrestrial wireless uses. XM and Sirius both paid around $90 each for their 12.5 mhz.
This scarcity of satellite bandwidth is why DirecTV has to upgrade all their receivers for their future expansion, to move to MPEG4 rather than MPEG2, more efficiency of the bandwidth they have now.
For a mobile service like XM or Sirius, selectively pointing a high gain antenna a different sats on the same frequencies from a mobile or handheld device is not very practical right now. So frequency re-use is out of the question. I understand that they both use multiple satellites for diversity, that is, the same content is transmitted from both sats and your receiver picks the strongest receiver.
Satellite also means that I won't have any interactive features as it would a 2-way system based on a huge network of wireless access points. And these networks of access points are coming, be it over your wireless phone or vi WiMax or similar technologies.
Just because a protocol isn't ideal doesn't mean it won't make business sense. If that was the case no one would be using VoIP!
(FYI- I spend only $20 to get unlimited wireless data with Tmobile, and only $15 with Sprint on my Treo)
We really need a aacPlus player for the Treo. I love the way 48k aacPlus streams sound, and I really wish I could get them on my Treo.
PS- *BSP* warning, SomaFM now is streaming 3 channels in 40kb aacPlus RTSP/LATM for 3GPP phones. So if you have one of the few Sprint 3GPP phones (Samsung and some Sanyo models) you can get our streams on those phones now.
If you go through their registration process and read their terms and conditions, you'd have to be insane to submit programming to them. Look at this from their terms and conditions (only available to registered users):
``Submitter will indemnify and hold harmless Infinity, and its affiliates, parent companies, subsidiaries, officers, shareholders, directors, employees, agents, representatives, successors, and assigns, ("Infinity Entities") against any and all loss, liability, claims, damages and other expenses, including reasonable attorneys fees, arising from (a) Infinity's use of the Material under this Agreement; (b) any act or omission by Submitter; (c) any breach of Submitter's representations and warranties in Paragraph 2 above. This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of New York, United States of America, without application of conflict of laws principles. Submitter agrees that all disputes arising under this Agreement will be litigated and adjudicated exclusively in State and/or Federal Court located in the State of New York, United States of America.``
So not only are you giving them free content, you're taking on all the legal responsibilities for that content DIRECTLY ON YOU. Because we wouldn't want a giant corporation like Infinity to get sued. Just some poor little podcast producer. And they'd have to go to New York to defend themselves!
Why buy a CD when I can buy a DVD with way more content? If I can buy a movie for $10 why can't I buy a CD for $10 or less? CD sales will go down more as DVD sales continue to go up.
I've even seem times where the DVD that contains the album, videos, and other footage sell for less than the CD alone.
You're not thinking far enough out. When the bandwidth is good enough and fast enough, the network won't go out.
Look at wired phones: in the early days of this generation, answering machines ruled. Then people got sick of their machines stopping because the tape was full or they forgot to rewind it or (gasp) the tape jammed.
And Telcos started bundling voice mail with other custom calling features. And it took off. So well that the cell network operators never dreamed of building answering machines into the handsets... why do that when the voice mail service could run at the switch level?
Sure, this isn't good enough for some people, or too expensive and better than necessary for others. So now you can buy a $20 answering machine with crap voice quality or use a $4.50 a month voice mail service. The mainstream user will pick the voice mail solution. A hacker or high end user will find a more sophisticated machine to customize. But this thread is talking about the middle hump of the bell curve here.
Your "apps" will come down the same pipe as your entertainment. Your receiver will be a smart box centrally administered, you can use it as a TV or a computer.
It will probably happen to laptops too, but we won't recognize those laptops. They'll be more like smart phones that attach to huge screens and full sized keyboards.
A lot of companies already outsource much of their computer infrastructure: financial apps are often run by ASPs and you are just opening up a term services window to it. And look at all the people outsourcing their email. Look at the popularity of webmail! That's an app thats maintained for you!
Why don't you think this will go from the corporate world to the mass market?
Sure power users will need computers. But look at all the people who use computers now who don't care they're a computer... they just want to run some apps... store some digital files, etc.
Power users will be the last adopters of this, if they ever completely adopt at all. But that center of the bell curve will likely go for this.
But: the network has to be more stable than the wired voice network today, and have way more bandwidth than it has now. that's a given. (Bandwidth on the level of 50+ mbit a sec bidirectional).
The RIAA is a lobbying organization. It's staff is full of lawyers. Think of them as a big special interest law group. If they're not suing someone, they're drafting legal agreements or working on changing laws to more suit their member companies.
As have been said before, they don't care about the settlement amounts. They are sending messages and establishing a body of prior case law.
The RIAA is really more of a messenger. If you hate the RIAA, you should really hate the RIAA member labels as that is where the RIAA's direction is coming from.
Start a letter writing campaign to your favorite bands and record labels demanding they end their membership in the RIAA.
``Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment.``
I don't know where you got this information, but it's completely inaccurate. In the USA, if you play music in your public space, be it a dentist office, mall, etc, you have to pay BMI and ASCAP, the US equivalents of SOCAN. This has been the case for many decades.
Perhaps your thinking of the subscription commercial music services like DMX or Muzak who provide music and bundle the licensing fees to the retailers- but radio stations are not licensed to resell music for playback in stores or on hold!
(The RIAA has nothing to do with this. BMI and ASCAP represent the performance copyright, where the RIAA represents the sound recording copyright.)
Sorry to sound so crass but/. has a terrible way of amplifying misinformation, and it has to be nipped in the bud.
`` A news feed is copyright, audio and visual and altering a copyrighted work is grounds for legal action``
Yes but distributing instructions on how to modify a copyrighted work is not. Altering and distributing a copyright work is illegal. Altering a copyrighted work for your personal use is legal.
If what you're saying was true, we could only view copyrighted works in their original complete format. We couldn't read part of a book. We couldn't listen to music with the TV on. You couldn't even color in a coloring book!
I think that the anti-intellectualism you speak of came about as an artifact of anti-elitism. This has also given many an excuse to not use their minds as much as they could.
Add to the fact that America has gotten lazy in the last 30-40 years, Americans have a good reason to not make the effort to learn more - they don't want to be like those elite intellectual types.
And lets face it, many of those very intellectual folks can also lack common sense. I wouldn't trade my common sense for a great intellect in quantum physics. I think you need intellect *and* common sense or street smarts to be a well rounded individual.
I'm not saying that scientific knowledge is unimportant at all, but rather that scientific knowledge without a clue of how to use that knowledge to improve society isn't very useful.
I've had a Tutrle Beach audiotron for 2 years now, and it's great. While it requires a computer with a web browser for initial setup of the radio service, after that you don't need a computer.
While it does rely on a runing server for initial sertup (called Turtle Radio) to pick your favorite channels and download the station list to the unit.
The only drawback is that you can't enter a radio URL directly into the machine.
However, I do the majority of my net radio listening on this device. And while it's only limited to MP3 streams, I don't find that much of a problem.
Kerbango besides requiring a broadband connection that was not available in enough homes at the time to support the product, also relied on a top-level server to collect data about the possible streams and make them available as "tunable channels".
Well, considering that Kerbango was killed by 3Com about 2 weeks before it was going to ship, of course it didn't make it into enough homes.
Kerbango died because 3Com got nervous about all the diffferent areas they had gotten into,
As for the central server for colelcting data about possible streams, that was the Kerbango Tuning Service which was licensed by Apple for the iTunes radio service. (In older versions of iTunes, you could see where it was connecting to kts.something.apple.com)
The Kerbango Tuning Service was never automated, it was all run by a guy who was the "stream editor". (Who worked under cotnract to Apple until the end of 2003)
Runor is that Apple is doing their own radio tuning service.
The Shoutcast.com station directory is available to hardware manufacturers as well, and is an automated system.
there's already high quality digital radio outside of the internet as well.
But aren't all those subscription services?
Anyway, the RIAA is now pushing for all digital radios to have hardware copy protection, and A BUY BUTTON!!!
http://somafm.com/riaa/
excerpt:
"The RIAA has brazenly suggested that new devices come equipped with a 'buy' button, underscoring their intent to force consumers to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves. We have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the 'play' button into the 'pay' button. At least the RIAA has addressed the semantics of the issue.
The artist doesn't actually have to be signed with the RIAA. They just have to register with SoundExchange.com and maybe someday they'll get a check for a tiny amount of money.
The system in theory is fair. In practice (and true to how it was actually designed) is that only the most popular tracks will receive royalty payments, and in those cases almost always the record labels own the copyright to the sound recording and hence will get all the $$.
The more streamripping takes off, the more stations will stop streaming title info and only put it on their web sites.
The problem you're seeing with DI.fm is also happening at lots of other stations... everyone will just get rid of or reduce the frequency of the meta data in the streams. I've even heard from some station operators on how they're randonly updating their metadata with advertising messages!
The problem with the net broadcasting medium right now is that each new listener costs us money in bandwidth, unlike traditional broadcast medium that has a fixed cost (mostly electricity to run the transmitter) to reach everyone within a geographic area. Bandwidth costs for streaming 128k to one listener for a month is $7-$30 depending on your bandwidth deal.
And once the RIAA sees streamripping take off, they're really going to have a good argument for charging net broadcasters huge royalty fees.
(Personally, I would much rather broadcast to a live audience than an audience of tape recorders, which is what streamrippers are. The problem is that I have limited capacities on my streams so each person streamripping (and not listening) represents one less potential live listener.)
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How can a law that specifically exempts something be considered a "historical accident"? Because copyright is a government granted monopoly, the lawmakers wanted to put some limitations on that monopoly, hence they created fair use and other exemptions - including exemptions for radio broadcasters.
The "historical accident" line, which the RIAA repeats over and over, is bullshit.
One of the problems of listener metrics on Podcasts is that you don't know who is listening (or how many times), you only know how many times they download the 'cast, or how many people subscribe to your feed.
Do you really only subscribe to podcasts you listen to? I know I've had several podcasts that I forgot to unsub from and they keep on downloading... even though I never listen to them. (Eventually I remembered to unsub).
``Also, with satellite radio, you get things like mixtapes, mashups and other stuff that hasn't been "published" -- no RIAA involved, just BMI, ASCAP, etc. With iPod, you snuggle up close to the RIAA posse.``
Practically speaking, I don't have to have RIAA permission to put stuff on my iPod.
But Sat Radio has to pay a lot or royalties and follow the rules set by the RIAA.
Those mix tapes and mashups? You don't think they include copyrighted sound recordings?!
Playback will use a lot of battery, the high quality codecs like aacPlus use a lot of CPU power to decode.
MP3 and AAC-LC (i.e. normal AAC) are a lot easier to decode and hence use less horsepower. AAC-HE (aka aacPlus) is effectively synthesizing the high end of the spectrum and that takes a lot of horsepower.
The OQO has very good linux support (albeit officially unsupported), available from their FTP site. I recall seeing the lead developer's email address posted as well, for bug reporting and such.
Do you think Virgin has their own towers, or MetroPCS or the other MVNOs? No, they lease airtime from others (Sprint in the case of MetroPCS and Virgin).
MVNOs provide the customer service, pick the offerings, choose the phones to support, and sell the service. The towers are operated by established players.
It's kind of like Earthlink selling SBC DSL under their own name, with their own additional features.
As a "Computer Nut" I do the Airport Express solution now. It's not perfect, and strongly lacking in some ways:
- With the Airport Express you don't get a nice GUI or remote control device.
- With the Airport Express, you can't play the same music in multiple rooms at once.
- You also have to have a computer running. I'm told the Sonus will play interenet radio without requiring a computer or file server running. (Roku does this as well, and apparently the new Slim Devices product does as well)
Sonus is too expensive now, but the price should come down.
As a HiFi enthusiast I don't care that it only a lame 50 watt amp, I'll use the line level outs to drive powered speakers, because active speakers sound better. (Why send audio over high current AC over big thick cables when you could put the amp in the speaker?)
An Idiot with Too Much Money(tm) probably has in-wall speakers and won't buy them from Sonus anyway.
I wasn't speaking about WiFi specifically, I was thinking more about WiMax which is designed to serve tons of customers at the same time, or wireless phones.
For popular programming, IP multicasting is effectively broadcasting over IP networks. Multicasting hasn't taken off big on the internet because of issues relating to ISP peering and routing protocol standards. However, universities and large corporations are using Multicast to deliver real time video to thousands of desktops at the same time.
But you're right, for large scale mass media, a satellite broadcast makes a lot of sense (except in areas where the sat can't be received well - e.g. office buildings). But for larger amounts of niche programming (there are well over 10,000 internet radio stations now) the bandwidth isn't there for satellite services to be broadcasting all of them all the time.
Nope, it wasn't an engineering choice, it's all about licensing and competing for spectrum. There always competition for bandwidth, and Satellite frequencies have to be shared with other services, terrestrial and in orbit. And a satellite can't broadcast on frequencies used terrestrially.
In the last round of negotiating for spectrum, 25mhz was allocated for SDARS (satellite digital audio radio services). Originally it was going to be much more, but congress decided to order the FCC to allocate/auction a lot of that bandwidth to terrestrial wireless uses. XM and Sirius both paid around $90 each for their 12.5 mhz.
This scarcity of satellite bandwidth is why DirecTV has to upgrade all their receivers for their future expansion, to move to MPEG4 rather than MPEG2, more efficiency of the bandwidth they have now.
For a mobile service like XM or Sirius, selectively pointing a high gain antenna a different sats on the same frequencies from a mobile or handheld device is not very practical right now. So frequency re-use is out of the question. I understand that they both use multiple satellites for diversity, that is, the same content is transmitted from both sats and your receiver picks the strongest receiver.
Satellite also means that I won't have any interactive features as it would a 2-way system based on a huge network of wireless access points. And these networks of access points are coming, be it over your wireless phone or vi WiMax or similar technologies.
Just because a protocol isn't ideal doesn't mean it won't make business sense. If that was the case no one would be using VoIP!
(FYI- I spend only $20 to get unlimited wireless data with Tmobile, and only $15 with Sprint on my Treo)
XM and Sirius each have only 12.5 mhz of bandwidth.
That's not much room at all for tons of broadcast channels.
We really need a aacPlus player for the Treo. I love the way 48k aacPlus streams sound, and I really wish I could get them on my Treo.
PS- *BSP* warning, SomaFM now is streaming 3 channels in 40kb aacPlus RTSP/LATM for 3GPP phones. So if you have one of the few Sprint 3GPP phones (Samsung and some Sanyo models) you can get our streams on those phones now.
If you go through their registration process and read their terms and conditions, you'd have to be insane to submit programming to them. Look at this from their terms and conditions (only available to registered users):
``Submitter will indemnify and hold harmless Infinity, and its affiliates, parent companies, subsidiaries, officers, shareholders, directors, employees, agents, representatives, successors, and assigns, ("Infinity Entities") against any and all loss, liability, claims, damages and other expenses, including reasonable attorneys fees, arising from (a) Infinity's use of the Material under this Agreement; (b) any act or omission by Submitter; (c) any breach of Submitter's representations and warranties in Paragraph 2 above. This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the State of New York, United States of America, without application of conflict of laws principles. Submitter agrees that all disputes arising under this Agreement will be litigated and adjudicated exclusively in State and/or Federal Court located in the State of New York, United States of America.``
So not only are you giving them free content, you're taking on all the legal responsibilities for that content DIRECTLY ON YOU. Because we wouldn't want a giant corporation like Infinity to get sued. Just some poor little podcast producer. And they'd have to go to New York to defend themselves!
(Viacom owns Infinity in case that's not clear)
Why buy a CD when I can buy a DVD with way more content? If I can buy a movie for $10 why can't I buy a CD for $10 or less? CD sales will go down more as DVD sales continue to go up.
I've even seem times where the DVD that contains the album, videos, and other footage sell for less than the CD alone.
The FM transmitters sound horrible, maybe you're lucky if you have 3% harmonic distortion and 48db s/n ratio. It would sound horrible.
You're not thinking far enough out. When the bandwidth is good enough and fast enough, the network won't go out.
Look at wired phones: in the early days of this generation, answering machines ruled. Then people got sick of their machines stopping because the tape was full or they forgot to rewind it or (gasp) the tape jammed.
And Telcos started bundling voice mail with other custom calling features. And it took off. So well that the cell network operators never dreamed of building answering machines into the handsets... why do that when the voice mail service could run at the switch level?
Sure, this isn't good enough for some people, or too expensive and better than necessary for others. So now you can buy a $20 answering machine with crap voice quality or use a $4.50 a month voice mail service. The mainstream user will pick the voice mail solution. A hacker or high end user will find a more sophisticated machine to customize. But this thread is talking about the middle hump of the bell curve here.
Your "apps" will come down the same pipe as your entertainment. Your receiver will be a smart box centrally administered, you can use it as a TV or a computer.
It will probably happen to laptops too, but we won't recognize those laptops. They'll be more like smart phones that attach to huge screens and full sized keyboards.
A lot of companies already outsource much of their computer infrastructure: financial apps are often run by ASPs and you are just opening up a term services window to it. And look at all the people outsourcing their email. Look at the popularity of webmail! That's an app thats maintained for you!
Why don't you think this will go from the corporate world to the mass market?
Sure power users will need computers. But look at all the people who use computers now who don't care they're a computer... they just want to run some apps... store some digital files, etc.
Power users will be the last adopters of this, if they ever completely adopt at all. But that center of the bell curve will likely go for this.
But: the network has to be more stable than the wired voice network today, and have way more bandwidth than it has now. that's a given. (Bandwidth on the level of 50+ mbit a sec bidirectional).
These LaCie and any of these that aren't RAID5 stand a good chance of losing your data... if one of the disks die, the whole volume is toast.
The RIAA is a lobbying organization. It's staff is full of lawyers. Think of them as a big special interest law group. If they're not suing someone, they're drafting legal agreements or working on changing laws to more suit their member companies.
As have been said before, they don't care about the settlement amounts. They are sending messages and establishing a body of prior case law.
The RIAA is really more of a messenger. If you hate the RIAA, you should really hate the RIAA member labels as that is where the RIAA's direction is coming from.
Start a letter writing campaign to your favorite bands and record labels demanding they end their membership in the RIAA.
``Using a broadcast radio station as the hold music on a phone system actually requires a copyright license from the station from which the artists/publishers should be seeking their payment.``
/. has a terrible way of amplifying misinformation, and it has to be nipped in the bud.
I don't know where you got this information, but it's completely inaccurate. In the USA, if you play music in your public space, be it a dentist office, mall, etc, you have to pay BMI and ASCAP, the US equivalents of SOCAN. This has been the case for many decades.
Perhaps your thinking of the subscription commercial music services like DMX or Muzak who provide music and bundle the licensing fees to the retailers- but radio stations are not licensed to resell music for playback in stores or on hold!
(The RIAA has nothing to do with this. BMI and ASCAP represent the performance copyright, where the RIAA represents the sound recording copyright.)
Sorry to sound so crass but
`` A news feed is copyright, audio and visual and altering a copyrighted work is grounds for legal action``
Yes but distributing instructions on how to modify a copyrighted work is not. Altering and distributing a copyright work is illegal. Altering a copyrighted work for your personal use is legal.
If what you're saying was true, we could only view copyrighted works in their original complete format. We couldn't read part of a book. We couldn't listen to music with the TV on. You couldn't even color in a coloring book!
I think that the anti-intellectualism you speak of came about as an artifact of anti-elitism. This has also given many an excuse to not use their minds as much as they could.
Add to the fact that America has gotten lazy in the last 30-40 years, Americans have a good reason to not make the effort to learn more - they don't want to be like those elite intellectual types.
And lets face it, many of those very intellectual folks can also lack common sense. I wouldn't trade my common sense for a great intellect in quantum physics. I think you need intellect *and* common sense or street smarts to be a well rounded individual.
I'm not saying that scientific knowledge is unimportant at all, but rather that scientific knowledge without a clue of how to use that knowledge to improve society isn't very useful.
I've had a Tutrle Beach audiotron for 2 years now, and it's great. While it requires a computer with a web browser for initial setup of the radio service, after that you don't need a computer.
While it does rely on a runing server for initial sertup (called Turtle Radio) to pick your favorite channels and download the station list to the unit.
The only drawback is that you can't enter a radio URL directly into the machine.
However, I do the majority of my net radio listening on this device. And while it's only limited to MP3 streams, I don't find that much of a problem.
Kerbango besides requiring a broadband connection that was not available in enough homes at the time to support the product, also relied on a top-level server to collect data about the possible streams and make them available as "tunable channels".
Well, considering that Kerbango was killed by 3Com about 2 weeks before it was going to ship, of course it didn't make it into enough homes.
Kerbango died because 3Com got nervous about all the diffferent areas they had gotten into,
As for the central server for colelcting data about possible streams, that was the Kerbango Tuning Service which was licensed by Apple for the iTunes radio service. (In older versions of iTunes, you could see where it was connecting to kts.something.apple.com)
The Kerbango Tuning Service was never automated, it was all run by a guy who was the "stream editor". (Who worked under cotnract to Apple until the end of 2003)
Runor is that Apple is doing their own radio tuning service.
The Shoutcast.com station directory is available to hardware manufacturers as well, and is an automated system.
there's already high quality digital radio outside of the internet as well.
But aren't all those subscription services?
Anyway, the RIAA is now pushing for all digital radios to have hardware copy protection, and A BUY BUTTON!!!
http://somafm.com/riaa/
excerpt:
"The RIAA has brazenly suggested that new devices come equipped with a 'buy' button, underscoring their intent to force consumers to buy what they have received for free since Fleming and Marconi first made it possible for consumers to hear news and music over the public airwaves. We have long been concerned about content owners seeking to change the 'play' button into the 'pay' button. At least the RIAA has addressed the semantics of the issue.
The artist doesn't actually have to be signed with the RIAA. They just have to register with SoundExchange.com and maybe someday they'll get a check for a tiny amount of money.
The system in theory is fair. In practice (and true to how it was actually designed) is that only the most popular tracks will receive royalty payments, and in those cases almost always the record labels own the copyright to the sound recording and hence will get all the $$.
The more streamripping takes off, the more stations will stop streaming title info and only put it on their web sites.
.)
The problem you're seeing with DI.fm is also happening at lots of other stations... everyone will just get rid of or reduce the frequency of the meta data in the streams. I've even heard from some station operators on how they're randonly updating their metadata with advertising messages!
The problem with the net broadcasting medium right now is that each new listener costs us money in bandwidth, unlike traditional broadcast medium that has a fixed cost (mostly electricity to run the transmitter) to reach everyone within a geographic area. Bandwidth costs for streaming 128k to one listener for a month is $7-$30 depending on your bandwidth deal.
And once the RIAA sees streamripping take off, they're really going to have a good argument for charging net broadcasters huge royalty fees.
(Personally, I would much rather broadcast to a live audience than an audience of tape recorders, which is what streamrippers are. The problem is that I have limited capacities on my streams so each person streamripping (and not listening) represents one less potential live listener