There would be a large number of branded TLD naming providers, all on an even playing field, all competing and innovating as they wish. They would have names that would be satisfactory international brands in the "directory" or "naming" business.
Examples I give would be.yahoo,.dunn,.wipo,.sloppy,.yellowpages,.fredsdirectory.
If you could legally get a trademark around the world for "XXXX Directory Company" (or if you already have one) you could have.XXXX as a resale TLD.
That would include of course any made-up word nobody is using yet, or any real world term that qualifies as a trademark law. The principles of that are well established and ruled in law and courts and used by businesses every day.
Thus there would be tons of competing companies, and you would choose the best one. The one with the best price, best policies, best technology, whatever your definition of best is. Whatever the market likes.
Thus Apple might decide to use apple.yahoo. If Apple records like's Dunn and Bradstreet they could be apple.dunn. If apple is taken within too many branded domains, more will spring up to meet the market need.
WIPO might run.wipo under trademark rules. They might insist that nobody gets apple, but Apple Computer can get apple.computer.wipo and Apple Records can get apple.records.wipo. Or they can set any rules they want. Don't like their rules, go to a competitor.
What matters is all the competitors are on a level playing field. If somebody owns ".computer" then if you don't like their rules you can't go to another TLD for a computer name that's just as good. Their TLD is inherently valuable, because it has an intrinsic meaning. They didn't create the value, the just staked a claim on it, presumably by being their first.
Brands, on the other hand, by definition have no intrinsic value. The acquire value, lots of it. That's what branding is about. Yahoo has a valuable brand in internet directories now, for example.
It is not fair to give ownership of words to people simply because they claimed them first. Trademark law worked out that principle over centuries. Nobody should get monopoly control over ordinary words that have intrinsic meanings. Not the TLD owner, not the 2LD registrants. When there was only.com for business in people's minds, people paid fortunes for names like drugstore.com because it let them own an english word like drugstore. Something trademark law had forbidden for good reasons.
You got it backwards. If there were an.apple TLD the growers of the fruit would not be able to register in it because that would be a generic use. In the real world, NOBODY gets to own the term "grannysmith apple" and it was a crazy mistake to let people own terms like this in DNS.
In theory companies that use apple as a trademark (and thus by law have nothing to do with apples) could possibly register in such a domain, if they were not operating it, but it might be better to design things to avoid this too.
Not only does OpenNIC not solve the problem, it appears to be little better than ICANN, handing out ownership of ordinary words like "geek" to those who are simply the first to claim them.
Even the trademark lawyers, usually the bad guy in this, worked out centuries ago that you don't give ownership in real words to anybody. The generic terms can't be owned, only brands.
Nobody should own "com" or "museum" or "aero" or "org", or 2LDs within them. But we do have that, so we fight over it.
No, I am not talking about opennic or new.net or similar. A splintered net is useless, which is why nobody uses these extra TLDs. I have yet to see any of these extra TLDs appear in a URL, ad, billboard or E-mail address, and for good reason.
There is a natural monopoly in the root. We all have to use the same root, or I can't tell you my e-mail address and expect you to be able to e-mail me with it. Or I have to tell you which root I use, which means a super-root that lists roots, in otherwords a shared root once again.
Attempts at alternate roots will fail both because of this, and because most of them so far have just tried to be a different ICANN. They still wanted to hand out TLD monopolies to people and create TLDs with inherent meaning.
A really workable system has to have all TLD operators (and thus the 2lDs under them) on an even footing. If they are not on an even footing you get artificial scarcity as people try to own meaningful words and phrases ahead of everybody else. Then you get conflict.
Actually, dollars are not the issue. Root servers actually can have a quite manageable load since they only have to tell you where the actual TLD servers are, and you cache that so you only ask quite rarely.
The money to run a set of root servers can quite easily be arranged. It's the will that's currently lacking.
As those who design DNS software know, the power over DNS resides not with ICANN, but collectively among all the people who configure the root server tables in the major sites and ISPs of the world, and in particular, in the sites that distribute the most common name servers (BIND and IIS) which come pre-configured with a root table that points at the official ICANN list.
If the net community got together and could express a unanimous will, that table could be changed. No court would be needed. Governments would be hard pressed to stop it.
But it requires near unanimity because a splintered net, where some people use some roots and the other half uses a different set, so names don't resolve the same, is bad for everybody.
Unanimity is impossible over a given policy but it seems near-unanimity might well be possible over replacing ICANN with another body that will represent the users in choosing a replacement for ICANN. We might universally agree to make the change according to some democratic user-based process even if we don't know how the final decision will go. We just all have to agree to do whatever 51% of the users approve.
But the key isn't if I can get unanimous support for my particularl proposal -- I can't. The question is, can we find a way to a path away from ICANN without yet agreeing on what it is?
How is he to do that if there are secret federal regulations requiring the airlines to demand your identity papers before you can fly?
I don't think John is suggesting that planes should not be secure. He's saying that one should not secure planes by taking away the right of free travel, free anonymous travel, from the people of the USA.
Some of you are willing to give up that right, does that mean all should? Or should we all be required to show our papers when we travel and have our movements tracked?
As to the option of not using the airplane, can you tell me how that works in a country the size of the USA? Should people who wish to protect their rights be relegated to forms of transport orders of magnitude slower, which effectively make it impossible to travel on short notice to many places?
Why should travel at the speed necessary to conduct business in this country be a privilege rather than a right?
We should not be so surprised. All the media will go through not one, but many revolutionary changes as digital media change the underlying assumptions.
We talk about it all the time on./ in music, soon in video, and of course TV.
TV advertising used to be linked closely with the show, the actors would break from acting and endorse the product during a show called "G.E. Hour" or "Hallmark Hall of Fame."
The PVR will make the 30 second ad not very useful, so they will move to other things.
I have a proposal for one possible change that was featured on/. a few months ago. Time for another link to the future of TV advertising
This is not about whether you can publish or use a blacklist. I think you can (at least until it becomes monopolistic, then other legal questions appear.)
THe issue at hand is the morality of blacklists and other tools which use punishment of the innocent as their means to get at the guilty. We don't tolerate that pratice in the other ways we try to regulate our lives, and it's curious that we tolerate it here.
As noted in the story, blacklisters are blocking off real innocent people. And people who don't know about it and don't ask for it are getting mail blocked that they wanted to receive.
John Gilmore, going to extremes to make a point about his own freedoms, got kicked off the internet not because his system was being used for spamming (he had his own techniques for blocking relay abuse) but because he and the blacklisters disagreed about how he should stop spam on his mailserver.
Doesn't the idea of "Run things our way or you don't get to communicate with others on the internet" bother you at all?
Shouldn't we try other methods, that don't punish the innocent, or which punish them as little as possible, if these methods are available to us?
Like I said, protection of free speech isn't just a law, it's a good idea.
Remember, with this technique it's not collateral damage. Collateral damage is what happens when you are trying to bomb a military target, and civilians are killed by shrapnel.
Blacklisting ISPs is like saying "bomb the civilians until they rise up and destroy the military target in their neighbourhood."
Effective perhaps, but moral? (And not always effective. It's our technique on Iraq right now, starve the civilians until they punt the bad guy.)
Free speech is about free speech. The first amendment is about limiting the government's ability to infringe on free speech.
Do you really believe that only the government has a moral duty to consider how their actions affect free speech? Yes, the government is the one with the <b>legal</b> duty to not infringe on free speech, but free speech is more than just the law, it's a good idea!
Yes, we <i>can</i> boycott who we chose, including the innocent. But should we? Is it a desireable state? We're replacing the old means of speech with a new one, one that relies entirely on private property. How should we design it? Does designing it to run entirely on private property mean that we want private property rights to trump the old rights the founders of the USA felt fit to write into the constitution?
These are hard questions, not necessarily rhetorical, since clearly some writers here do think that now that we've escaped the bounds of government we should ignore the principles it was designed with in free states.
There are other ways to punish bad ISPs without blocking the mail of innocent users. In particular, the obvious one rarely implemented is not to block mail from sites but to throttle its volume down, so that individual mails go through and bulk mails are blocked. A coordinated effort to do this, as I have written about on my web site, would cause vastly less collateral damage.
Do we have a duty to not cause collateral damage? I think so.
So where did you stand when laws wanted to blame the ISP for porn, or copyright violations by their users? But the ISPs aren't the innocent I'm talking about? I'm talking about the users. If a murderer was hiding in a neighbourhood, would you kill one innocent neighbour per hour until the neighbours got together and rooted him out?
All internet traffic uses the property of others. We designed the internet on an "I pay for my end, you pay for your end and we don't sweath the packets" basis. Why not fight spam without tearing that down, without declaring that communication is property abuse. How can you have a free society if communication is property abuse?
What amazes me about the spam fight is how much it has led people to promote the idea of punishing the innocent in order to get at the guilty.
People who would have fought with vigour against punishing the innocent in other fields seem willing to give it up, in of all places, the free speech question of who can email whom.
Yikes. We are willing to let murderers go to make sure we don't punish the innocent. Yet for some reason spam makes people think it's OK to trample on the free speech rights of the innocent to get not a murderer, but a spammer. I hate spammers as much as anybody -- I get 120 per day -- but let's keep them in perspective.
The most common justification is the canard that it's not about speech it's about property. Problem is all use of the internet involves using somebody else's property. On the internet there is no speech without the use of other people's property, and thus no unsolicited communication without the unsolicited use of somebody else's property. This makes it very tough to solve by thinking of it as a property issue.
There are other, better methods that don't generate false positives or generate extremely few. I've written extensively on them.
The fact that some people get free bandwidth I doubt brings much sway to the recording act.
Remember, these rules are only for labels that don't want the airplay. If they want the airplay they can, should and probably will be able to declare that they waive the fee, and stations can play those songs all the time.
The real question is "Is this rule fair for labels whose songs are being played against their will?" Either because they don't want to be played or want to be paid more if they are played.
In that case I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that, certainly for commercial operations, the recording artists deserve at least as much as is paid for bandwidth. The music is the real product, the bandwidth just a tool to deliver it.
The remaining question is whether the law is there to facilitate non-commercial operations who have access to cheap or free bandwidth playing music for free against the will of the labels or recording artists. And that is an interesting question. The librarian decided otherwise and it's reasonable to debate that.
However, the numbers I work out for a fully commercial operation suggest that to support 1000 peak listeners with 64 megabits of bandwidth with 15 songs/hour would cost about $6300/month for the music fees and $10000/month for the bandwidth from a real provider. If you know of providers that will give you 64 megabits that you can saturate full-time with reasonable uptime, let me know, but $200/megabit seems on the low end.
For a real commercial operation I just don't see how this can be described as impossibly high.
Do you suggeste we should design the law to allow commercial operations who scarf free bandwidth from a university or company?
Again, it would be better if the government didn't set the price of music. Constitutionally, I don't see the difference between music and other media that should allow this. This law might actually get in the way of real deals being made at better prices that all agree on. Like we've said, a big percentage of acts would be happy to get played at no charge.
The RIAA is doomed in part because of its unwillingless to embrace the new medium, but does this mean it should be legislated overnight? I would much rather see the RIAA killed because new and inovative labels realize that they will make more money by letting webcasters promote their music instead of fighting them.
BTW, I don't think very many other people are reading this thread at this point.
While I don't know if anybody is still reading this a day after the topic comes up, I'll just say that I have no love for the DMCA, in this or other things.
But I just don't see this "impossibly high" comment. What I can see shows a similar cost to the cost of bandwidth. Do you really think that it's appropriate to call a cost in that range impossibly high? If they can't afford the bandwidth, how can they operate?
Put yourself in the shoes of a band with a record. Presume you're not keen to have it cast on webradio, so you're not willing to do it for a lower price.
Against your will, the station can play your song for $.0007. They could play the song to three million people and pay your label $2100. A million people. You might get 10% of what the label gets, or $210. Would you call that impossibly high?
Compare it to buying. Some people play an album 50 times, some play it just once. Let's guess the average person plays it 5 times. Thus a million plays maps to 600,000 sales of a single. That would be a GOLD record. And you would get $210 with people complaining it was impossibly high. A GOLD record's worth of plays and you can barely buy a nice dinner for the band.
There's no way to reconcile the two viewpoints. For the labels, the rates are impossibly low. For the webcasters, impossibly high.
The only thing that reconciles them is what did it on broadcast radio. The labels were happy to get their music on the air for free to promote the songs and sell CDs. In fact they were happy to pay Payola to make that happen.
There's no easy answer here, not in compulsory licences.
Well, I agree that it's not so appropriate to have a different rule for internet use and over-the-air use, but frankly I'm against the government dictating the rules and prices at all. I think the market should do that. If that means there can't be free radio, that's sad but the result of a rather strange regime in music.
In areas outside music, there are no compulsory licences at all. These are a bizarre anomaly and it amazes me (and many constitutional lawyers) that they are constitutional at all. We certainly wouldn't tolerate the government dictating maximum prices and compulsory licences for newspapers, movies, software, books and so on.
But, given that music does have these government set licences and prices, I'm surprised at claims that they should be far, far below the cost of bandwidth. By what definition of fairness is that the case?
Remember, the default rule of copyright law, without these compulsory licences, is that you can't play it at all without the permission of the copyright holders.
Sorry, misread about the.0002 fee. However, a station with 1000 simultaneous listeners (and they don't tend to have that value all day long) is one of the top few these days, and if you can get 128 megabits of saturated, decent quality bandwidth for $4K, then some companies sure are raking in huge profits on bandwidth. However, the point is that the station would be paying half your low bandwidth price for their music, and frankly, I am not surprised that record labels would complain that the stations pay less for the actual music which is the real product than for the bandwidth.
We don't know what ASCAP will charge. For ordinary radio it's about 1% of revenue.
It is odd that over the air, the stations don't pay the labels -- in fact often the labels pay the stations, at first directly with Payola, and now using other law-skirting rules.
That's why it seems that labels that want to promote their music will be willing to waive this charge. One hopes so.
The.0002 rate is for the non-commercial stations, I believe. The.0007 rate is for the commercial stations.
What happens is that stations will start playing small indie label music which decides not to charge mostly, and as much big label music at the.0007 rate as they can afford. For example, if you play 4 big label songs/hour and the rest free or really low cost independent label stuff, it costs.3 cents/hour per user.
In other words, you could have 1,000 simultaneous listeners (does any internet radio station have that many?) and pay a whopping $3/hour with a few hits per hour and a lot of new, small label music.
I've often wondered if people like the President haven't been getting these installed for a while. Encrypted of course, powered by energy beamed from something worn on the body.
It would be great, if you were a politician, to have your staff able to secretly say something to you as you work a crowd or a room. You could seem like a total genius, remember everybody's name, have every fact at the ready.
I worked out this idea a decade ago, and even pitched friends at Qualcomm about it. They didn't feel it would be that good a product at the time. Perhaps this time it will actually get done.
The article says that, but further reading of the material later in the article contradicts it.
The court didn't say you can't copyright an FAQ
on
Can FAQs Be Copyrighted?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They simply said that you can't copyright the idea of an FAQ or the format of an FAQ, or a list of obvious questions.
If the FAQ had been swiped, with answers copied verbatim, it would have been a different ruling. The court ruled the competitor's FAQ was sufficiently different to not be an infringement, or so the article you point at said.
Slashdot Mirror
There would be a large number of branded TLD naming providers, all on an even playing field, all competing and innovating as they wish. They would have names that would be satisfactory international brands in the "directory" or "naming" business.
.yahoo, .dunn, .wipo, .sloppy, .yellowpages, .fredsdirectory.
.XXXX as a resale TLD.
.wipo under trademark rules. They might insist that nobody gets apple, but Apple Computer can get apple.computer.wipo and Apple Records can get apple.records.wipo. Or they can set any rules they want. Don't like their rules, go to a competitor.
Examples I give would be
If you could legally get a trademark around the world for "XXXX Directory Company" (or if you already have one) you could have
That would include of course any made-up word nobody is using yet, or any real world term that qualifies as a trademark law. The principles of that are well established and ruled in law and courts and used by businesses every day.
Thus there would be tons of competing companies, and you would choose the best one. The one with the best price, best policies, best technology, whatever your definition of best is. Whatever the market likes.
Thus Apple might decide to use apple.yahoo. If Apple records like's Dunn and Bradstreet they could be apple.dunn. If apple is taken within too many branded domains, more will spring up to meet the market need.
WIPO might run
What matters is all the competitors are on a level playing field. If somebody owns ".computer" then if you don't like their rules you can't go to another TLD for a computer name that's just as good. Their TLD is inherently valuable, because it has an intrinsic meaning. They didn't create the value, the just staked a claim on it, presumably by being their first.
Brands, on the other hand, by definition have no intrinsic value. The acquire value, lots of it. That's what branding is about. Yahoo has a valuable brand in internet directories now, for example.
It is not fair to give ownership of words to people simply because they claimed them first. Trademark law worked out that principle over centuries. Nobody should get monopoly control over ordinary words that have intrinsic meanings. Not the TLD owner, not the 2LD registrants. When there was only .com for business in people's minds, people paid fortunes for names like drugstore.com because it let them own an english word like drugstore. Something trademark law had forbidden for good reasons.
You got it backwards. If there were an .apple TLD the growers of the fruit would not be able to register in it because that would be a generic use. In the real world, NOBODY gets to own the term "grannysmith apple" and it was a crazy mistake to let people own terms like this in DNS.
In theory companies that use apple as a trademark (and thus by law have nothing to do with apples) could possibly register in such a domain, if they were not operating it, but it might be better to design things to avoid this too.
Not only does OpenNIC not solve the problem, it appears to be little better than ICANN, handing out ownership of ordinary words like "geek" to those who are simply the first to claim them.
Even the trademark lawyers, usually the bad guy in this, worked out centuries ago that you don't give ownership in real words to anybody. The generic terms can't be owned, only brands.
Nobody should own "com" or "museum" or "aero" or "org", or 2LDs within them. But we do have that, so we fight over it.
No, I am not talking about opennic or new.net or similar. A splintered net is useless, which is why nobody uses these extra TLDs. I have yet to see any of these extra TLDs appear in a URL, ad, billboard or E-mail address, and for good reason.
There is a natural monopoly in the root. We all have to use the same root, or I can't tell you my e-mail address and expect you to be able to e-mail me with it. Or I have to tell you which root I use, which means a super-root that lists roots, in otherwords a shared root once again.
Attempts at alternate roots will fail both because of this, and because most of them so far have just tried to be a different ICANN. They still wanted to hand out TLD monopolies to people and create TLDs with inherent meaning.
A really workable system has to have all TLD operators (and thus the 2lDs under them) on an even footing. If they are not on an even footing you get artificial scarcity as people try to own meaningful words and phrases ahead of everybody else. Then you get conflict.
Nobody has done this.
Actually, dollars are not the issue. Root servers actually can have a quite manageable load since they only have to tell you where the actual TLD servers are, and you cache that so you only ask quite rarely.
The money to run a set of root servers can quite easily be arranged. It's the will that's currently lacking.
As those who design DNS software know, the power over DNS resides not with ICANN, but collectively among all the people who configure the root server tables in the major sites and ISPs of the world, and in particular, in the sites that distribute the most common name servers (BIND and IIS) which come pre-configured with a root table that points at the official ICANN list.
If the net community got together and could express a unanimous will, that table could be changed. No court would be needed. Governments would be hard pressed to stop it.
But it requires near unanimity because a splintered net, where some people use some roots and the other half uses a different set, so names don't resolve the same, is bad for everybody.
Unanimity is impossible over a given policy but it seems near-unanimity might well be possible over replacing ICANN with another body that will represent the users in choosing a replacement for ICANN. We might universally agree to make the change according to some democratic user-based process even if we don't know how the final decision will go. We just all have to agree to do whatever 51% of the users approve.
How this works is documented on my web site at this essay along with my proposed possible replacement.
But the key isn't if I can get unanimous support for my particularl proposal -- I can't. The question is, can we find a way to a path away from ICANN without yet agreeing on what it is?
How is he to do that if there are secret federal regulations requiring the airlines to demand your identity papers before you can fly?
I don't think John is suggesting that planes should not be secure. He's saying that one should not secure planes by taking away the right of free travel, free anonymous travel, from the people of the USA.
Some of you are willing to give up that right, does that mean all should? Or should we all be required to show our papers when we travel and have our movements tracked?
As to the option of not using the airplane, can you tell me how that works in a country the size of the USA? Should people who wish to protect their rights be relegated to forms of transport orders of magnitude slower, which effectively make it impossible to travel on short notice to many places?
Why should travel at the speed necessary to conduct business in this country be a privilege rather than a right?
We should not be so surprised. All the media will go through not one, but many revolutionary changes as digital media change the underlying assumptions.
./ in music, soon in video, and of course TV.
/. a few months ago. Time for another link to the future of TV advertising
We talk about it all the time on
TV advertising used to be linked closely with the show, the actors would break from acting and endorse the product during a show called "G.E. Hour" or "Hallmark Hall of Fame."
The PVR will make the 30 second ad not very useful, so they will move to other things.
I have a proposal for one possible change that was featured on
So we can't be critical of their choice, and debate the consequences for the future of E-mail as a medium?
I have offered a wide variety of solutions.
however, this is a day old Slashdot thread, and nobody reads them after a day, so I'm out of here.
The solutions are on my web site.
This is not about whether you can publish or use a blacklist. I think you can (at least until it becomes monopolistic, then other legal questions appear.)
THe issue at hand is the morality of blacklists and other tools which use punishment of the innocent as their means to get at the guilty. We don't tolerate that pratice in the other ways we try to regulate our lives, and it's curious that we tolerate it here.
As noted in the story, blacklisters are blocking off real innocent people. And people who don't know about it and don't ask for it are getting mail blocked that they wanted to receive.
John Gilmore, going to extremes to make a point about his own freedoms, got kicked off the internet not because his system was being used for spamming (he had his own techniques for blocking relay abuse) but because he and the blacklisters disagreed about how he should stop spam on his mailserver.
Doesn't the idea of "Run things our way or you don't get to communicate with others on the internet" bother you at all?
Shouldn't we try other methods, that don't punish the innocent, or which punish them as little as possible, if these methods are available to us?
Like I said, protection of free speech isn't just a law, it's a good idea.
Remember, with this technique it's not collateral damage. Collateral damage is what happens when you are trying to bomb a military target, and civilians are killed by shrapnel.
Blacklisting ISPs is like saying "bomb the civilians until they rise up and destroy the military target in their neighbourhood."
Effective perhaps, but moral? (And not always effective. It's our technique on Iraq right now, starve the civilians until they punt the bad guy.)
Free speech is about free speech. The first amendment is about limiting the government's ability to infringe on free speech.
Do you really believe that only the government has a moral duty to consider how their actions affect free speech? Yes, the government is the one with the <b>legal</b> duty to not infringe on free speech, but free speech is more than just the law, it's a good idea!
Yes, we <i>can</i> boycott who we chose, including the innocent. But should we? Is it a desireable state? We're replacing the old means of speech with a new one, one that relies entirely on private property. How should we design it? Does designing it to run entirely on private property mean that we want private property rights to trump the old rights the founders of the USA felt fit to write into the constitution?
These are hard questions, not necessarily rhetorical, since clearly some writers here do think that now that we've escaped the bounds of government we should ignore the principles it was designed with in free states.
There are other ways to punish bad ISPs without blocking the mail of innocent users. In particular, the obvious one rarely implemented is not to block mail from sites but to throttle its volume down, so that individual mails go through and bulk mails are blocked. A coordinated effort to do this, as I have written about on my web site, would cause vastly less collateral damage.
Do we have a duty to not cause collateral damage? I think so.
So where did you stand when laws wanted to blame the ISP for porn, or copyright violations by their users? But the ISPs aren't the innocent I'm talking about? I'm talking about the users. If a murderer was hiding in a neighbourhood, would you kill one innocent neighbour per hour until the neighbours got together and rooted him out?
All internet traffic uses the property of others. We designed the internet on an "I pay for my end, you pay for your end and we don't sweath the packets" basis. Why not fight spam without tearing that down, without declaring that communication is property abuse. How can you have a free society if communication is property abuse?
What amazes me about the spam fight is how much it has led people to promote the idea of punishing the innocent in order to get at the guilty.
People who would have fought with vigour against punishing the innocent in other fields seem willing to give it up, in of all places, the free speech question of who can email whom.
Yikes. We are willing to let murderers go to make sure we don't punish the innocent. Yet for some reason spam makes people think it's OK to trample on the free speech rights of the innocent to get not a murderer, but a spammer. I hate spammers as much as anybody -- I get 120 per day -- but let's keep them in perspective.
The most common justification is the canard that it's not about speech it's about property. Problem is all use of the internet involves using somebody else's property. On the internet there is no speech without the use of other people's property, and thus no unsolicited communication without the unsolicited use of somebody else's property. This makes it very tough to solve by thinking of it as a property issue.
There are other, better methods that don't generate false positives or generate extremely few. I've written extensively on them.
Did you have to put it in the headline of the story and spoil it for thus of us on the west coast who haven't read the news yet?
(I'm originally from Toronto, the Who's favourite concert town, so don't flame me.)
The fact that some people get free bandwidth I doubt brings much sway to the recording act.
Remember, these rules are only for labels that don't want the airplay. If they want the airplay they can, should and probably will be able to declare that they waive the fee, and stations can play those songs all the time.
The real question is "Is this rule fair for labels whose songs are being played against their will?" Either because they don't want to be played or want to be paid more if they are played.
In that case I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that, certainly for commercial operations, the recording artists deserve at least as much as is paid for bandwidth. The music is the real product, the bandwidth just a tool to deliver it.
The remaining question is whether the law is there to facilitate non-commercial operations who have access to cheap or free bandwidth playing music for free against the will of the labels or recording artists. And that is an interesting question. The librarian decided otherwise and it's reasonable to debate that.
However, the numbers I work out for a fully commercial operation suggest that to support 1000 peak listeners with 64 megabits of bandwidth with 15 songs/hour would cost about $6300/month for the music fees and $10000/month for the bandwidth from a real provider. If you know of providers that will give you 64 megabits that you can saturate full-time with reasonable uptime, let me know, but $200/megabit seems on the low end.
For a real commercial operation I just don't see how this can be described as impossibly high.
Do you suggeste we should design the law to allow commercial operations who scarf free bandwidth from a university or company?
Again, it would be better if the government didn't set the price of music. Constitutionally, I don't see the difference between music and other media that should allow this. This law might actually get in the way of real deals being made at better prices that all agree on. Like we've said, a big percentage of acts would be happy to get played at no charge.
The RIAA is doomed in part because of its unwillingless to embrace the new medium, but does this mean it should be legislated overnight? I would much rather see the RIAA killed because new and inovative labels realize that they will make more money by letting webcasters promote their music instead of fighting them.
BTW, I don't think very many other people are reading this thread at this point.
While I don't know if anybody is still reading this a day after the topic comes up, I'll just say that I have no love for the DMCA, in this or other things.
But I just don't see this "impossibly high" comment. What I can see shows a similar cost to the cost of bandwidth. Do you really think that it's appropriate to call a cost in that range impossibly high? If they can't afford the bandwidth, how can they operate?
Put yourself in the shoes of a band with a record. Presume you're not keen to have it cast on webradio, so you're not willing to do it for a lower price.
Against your will, the station can play your song for $.0007. They could play the song to three million people and pay your label $2100. A million people. You might get 10% of what the label gets, or $210. Would you call that impossibly high?
Compare it to buying. Some people play an album 50 times, some play it just once. Let's guess the average person plays it 5 times. Thus a million plays maps to 600,000 sales of a single. That would be a GOLD record. And you would get $210 with people complaining it was impossibly high. A GOLD record's worth of plays and you can barely buy a nice dinner for the band.
There's no way to reconcile the two viewpoints. For the labels, the rates are impossibly low. For the webcasters, impossibly high.
The only thing that reconciles them is what did it on broadcast radio. The labels were happy to get their music on the air for free to promote the songs and sell CDs. In fact they were happy to pay Payola to make that happen.
There's no easy answer here, not in compulsory licences.
Well, I agree that it's not so appropriate to have a different rule for internet use and over-the-air use, but frankly I'm against the government dictating the rules and prices at all. I think the market should do that. If that means there can't be free radio, that's sad but the result of a rather strange regime in music.
In areas outside music, there are no compulsory licences at all. These are a bizarre anomaly and it amazes me (and many constitutional lawyers) that they are constitutional at all. We certainly wouldn't tolerate the government dictating maximum prices and compulsory licences for newspapers, movies, software, books and so on.
But, given that music does have these government set licences and prices, I'm surprised at claims that they should be far, far below the cost of bandwidth. By what definition of fairness is that the case?
Remember, the default rule of copyright law, without these compulsory licences, is that you can't play it at all without the permission of the copyright holders.
Sorry, misread about the .0002 fee. However, a station with 1000 simultaneous listeners (and they don't tend to have that value all day long) is one of the top few these days, and if you can get 128 megabits of saturated, decent quality bandwidth for $4K, then some companies sure are raking in huge profits on bandwidth. However, the point is that the station would be paying half your low bandwidth price for their music, and frankly, I am not surprised that record labels would complain that the stations pay less for the actual music which is the real product than for the bandwidth.
We don't know what ASCAP will charge. For ordinary radio it's about 1% of revenue.
It is odd that over the air, the stations don't pay the labels -- in fact often the labels pay the stations, at first directly with Payola, and now using other law-skirting rules.
That's why it seems that labels that want to promote their music will be willing to waive this charge. One hopes so.
The .0002 rate is for the non-commercial stations, I believe. The .0007 rate is for the commercial stations.
.0007 rate as they can afford. For example, if you play 4 big label songs/hour and the rest free or really low cost independent label stuff, it costs .3 cents/hour per user.
What happens is that stations will start playing small indie label music which decides not to charge mostly, and as much big label music at the
In other words, you could have 1,000 simultaneous listeners (does any internet radio station have that many?) and pay a whopping $3/hour with a few hits per hour and a lot of new, small label music.
I've often wondered if people like the President haven't been getting these installed for a while. Encrypted of course, powered by energy beamed from
something worn on the body.
It would be great, if you were a politician, to have your staff able to secretly say something to you as you work a crowd or a room. You could seem like a total genius, remember everybody's name, have every fact at the ready.
I worked out this idea a decade ago, and even pitched friends at Qualcomm about it. They didn't feel it would be that good a product at the time. Perhaps this time it will actually get done.
The article says that, but further reading of the material later in the article contradicts it.
They simply said that you can't copyright the idea of an FAQ or the format of an FAQ, or a list of obvious questions.
If the FAQ had been swiped, with answers copied verbatim, it would have been a different ruling. The court ruled the competitor's FAQ was sufficiently different to not be an infringement, or so the article you point at said.
So this is much ado over nothing.