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Copyright Office Rejects CARP Recommendations
Posted by
michael
on Tue May 21, 2002 10:45 AM
from the pay-the-piper dept.
from the pay-the-piper dept.
dave-fu writes "This just in: webcasters can breathe a sigh of relief as common sense and good taste has won out over stuffed suits and greased pockets--CARP has been rejected. If you weren't aware of it, CARP would have imposed exorbitant fees on webcasters, effectively killing webcasting radiostations, or at least preventing them from playing all (American) copyrighted music." See our previous story, or saveinternetradio.org, or read through the Copyright Office page linked above for background information. I wouldn't rejoice just yet - while webcasters argued that the proposed rates were way too high, the RIAA argued that they were way too low. There will still be royalty rates set by the Copyright Office, and the final rates may not be anything to cheer about.
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Yes! (Score:4, Insightful)
/gleffler
All I can say is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Hug a librarian (Score:3, Funny)
Common Sense (Score:5, Insightful)
With regular radio broadcasts, the number of listeners has no impact on your ability to deliver content (in this case, music). With internet broadcasts, the more users you have, you need to have more bandwidth to be able to serve them content at the same data rate. In some (most?) cases more bandwidth leads to more expenditure of $$$.
If the other expenses of internet radio stations are to be considered in setting of these royalty rates (which I think is BS in the first place, the RIAA is too damn greedy) I should hope they will use common sense and set them lower.
Re:Common Sense (Score:2)
Hmmm....well, in theory, the costs of an FCC license and signal amplifiers, antennas, etc are pretty damn expensive as well. I'd be interested in a montly cost summary between the two if one existed. I have to believe that it's cheaper to run an Internet based station. Bandwidth isn't that expensive. Here in silicon valley, we're getting very competitive rates for full rate T1's (< $600) from Worldcom (are they bankrupt yet), Globix (are they bankrupt yet>), etc.
Hmmm, maybe I don't have a good bandwidth point...
Given the fact that anyone and everyone seems to have an internet radio station and that it takes some serious corporate money to deal with the FCC.....
Re:Common Sense (Score:2)
Waitaminnit! (Score:4, Funny)
You're all assuming that the LoC wants Internet radio to be free, or cheaper than CARP wanted, but that might not be the case! Maybe the LoC wants HIGHER royalty rates!
Parent
Re:Common Sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's an interesting question though: what is the theoretical limit on the number of receivers that can receive a tv or radio broadcast? I suppose part of it would have to do with the number, size and density of the antennas closest to the tower. The density of antennas would have to be so dense that all transmissions would be absorbed.
What they would have required.... (Score:5, Informative)
A) The name of the service
B) The channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station id)
C) The type of program (Archived/Looped/Live)
D) Date of Transmission
E) Time of Transmission
F) Time zone of origination of Transmission
G) Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program
H) Duration of transmission (to nearest second)
I) Sound Recording Title
J) The ISRC code of the recording
K) The release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track
L) Featured recording artist
M) Retail album title
N) The recording Label
O) The UPC code of the retail album
P) The catalog number
Q) The copyright owner information
R) The musical genre of the channel or program (station format)
And a listener's log listing:
1) The name of the service or entity
2) The channel or program
3) the date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone)
4) the date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone)
5) The time zone where the signal was received (user)
6) Unique User identifier
7) The country in which the user received the transmissions
College radiostation's view (Score:4, Interesting)
We don't get too wide of a listening audience (compared to your average commercial webcaster), but it's still important that Internet maintains a wide variety of webcasters.
Note the article says that the final decision is to be made on June 20, so it's not over yet. We have put up flyers and a notice on our web page about the rates, but it's been difficult to raise awareness to this issue: most people just don't care.
(sorry, anon at work..)
Re:College radiostation's view (Score:3, Informative)
the regualtions they were/are shooting for are totally targetted at mainstream commercial stations. i think in the process they wanted to take out all small, low budget internet only stations.
a few years ago we pondered ditching the music that is copywritten and therefore falls under this proposal. it's not really possible. a lot of indie music is registered, plus all it takes is one band doing one cover song to blow the whole thing. ARGH!
hopefully the revised deal will make more sense to non-commercial stations.
Why is the government involved? (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not be very nice, but if the RIAA wants to keep its music from being webcast, I don't see why the government should stop them. If they want to charge royalty rates that effectively do the same thing, that's their bad business decision.
So why is the Copyright Office involved?
Re:Why is the government involved? (Score:5, Informative)
17 USC 115. Scope of exclusive rights in nondramatic musical works: Compulsory license for making and distributing phonorecords [copyright.gov]
Parent
Re:Why is the government involved? (Score:2)
Uhhhhm, why wouldn't they be? Copyright is a governmental creation. It is part of the Constitution. Without this, there is no "Copyright." It is up to government, according to the Constitution, to set up the rules as to how copyright works. No government, no copyright.
I love hearing from unaware people (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not be very nice, but if I want to copy a friend's CD, I don't see why the government should stop me.
You see, Copyright isn't a natural right, it is done by legislative fiat. Thus, part of what you "give up" for copyright and DMCA protection is the government get to tell you how you can apply those right.
If you don't like it, then don't apply for the copyright. "Oh dear" you say, "Then I have no protection". Well yes, that's the point. If you want the FBI to be your copyright militia, then you have to play by their rules.
Remember, there is no RIGHT to a copyright.
Parent
Good, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
One thing that lots of the places seemed to bitch about was the tracking of the listeners. Now, I know that they wanted it to be retroactive to the DMCA and that's just stupid, but from say now on, what's the big deal? Can't a log parser do this in no time? Just track unique hosts or something like that. If they just needed numbers it should be a no brainer, even something like webalizer can give you those numbers if you set it up right.
Re:Good, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Web radio stations are already supposed to pay ASCAP/BMI, this is on top of and far more than those fees.
I wish people would take it upon themselves to be more informed before posting.
Parent
Re:Good, but... (Score:2)
I worked for a radio station. No, the record labels do not waive royalty fees for traditional broadcasters. Traditional broadcasters are required to pay royalties to ASCAP/BMI which in turn gives some of that to the record companies and some to the songwriters They keep a log of what songs have been played and then pay a small (in cents) royalty everytime a song is played.
What CARP seeks to do is have a fee over and above that because users can capture the streams to a file and (theoretically) have a flawless reproduction of the original.
Re:Good, but... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, CARP does not do anything to break out something for "non-flawless" broadcasts. I work on a four hour live streaming video show that uses music. We don't use full quality audio in the stream because of the video. However, we are still treated as if we are transmitting CD quality. No one could make a decent copy from the audio we send out. We don't mind paying a reasonable fee, like ASCAP/BMI/SESAC but CARP was horrid in both cost and reporting. Heck, ours is a totally donation funded show with no advertising. CARP would have been instant death for us. I am hoping for something a little more reasoned.
Re:Good, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
And how's that? I can't get internet radio in my car. I only listen to the radio at home for very specific programs (prairie home companion, car talk...).
I use internet radio when I'm buried in a building with bad reception and I have something specific I want to listen to (9/11 coverage) or when I am looking for a very specific genre.
Do air-wave radio stations track the number of listeners at any particular time? Not that I know of.
During Diane Rehm's show yesterday, the riaa said they would go lower on licensing costs if they 'liked' the radio station. Because of that comment, I now feel the riaa wants these high music tariffs so they can use them as payola. If you play music they like, they drop your costs (possibly to 0), but if they don't, you pay the way-to-much amount and are forced out of business.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander....if internet radio must pay fees, they must be equal to those paid my commercial stations _without_ enronaccounting (formerly known as payola).
Parent
Re:Good, but... (Score:2)
Re:Good, but... (Score:2)
I think that saying the commercial internet radio stations have an advantage over commercial radiative stations (assuming, for the moment, that the internet commercial stations aren't just divisions of a traditional, pump-out-radio-waves place) is not as obviously true as you may assume. They are related but fairly different enterprises.
Internet radio stations have lower equipment costs to broadcast, but their users have much higher equipment costs to listen (the cheapest computer you'll be able to use to listen to a net stream will probably set you back 250-350 american dollars, not to mention the cost of net access, and how much does a decent little am/fm thing cost? maybe 20 bucks?). Also, for a net radio station to reach and service the same number of potential users as a 100,000 watt radio tower (which could be in the tens to hundreds of thousands depending on where the tower is), I'm betting the bandwidth costs would far exceed the FCC frequency license... Staff costs would be about the same, as would things like office space.
So, basically, it's not a trivial thing to compare sound-broadcast-places that use different mediums of transmission, because each one has fundamentally different economic constraints.
With regard to tracking listeners, this is far less trivial than you would assume. A simple log parser isn't going to do it (... to the standard of precision they wanted, anyway). Hell, all of AOL shows up as coming from a handful of IPs in west virginia. NATing gateways are common, so that one IP could be a college kid in Nebraska or thirty people in a branch office in Texas or ...
Shooting themselves in the perverbial foot... (Score:4, Insightful)
If the United States makes it illegal/expensivie to operate an internet radio station, the radio station can simply move its servers to another location (lets say Canada or UK) where the regulation doesn't exist (yet). There is no visible effect on the service to the user, and the American government successfully alienates another new technology. In the mean time other contries will benefit from the short-sightedness of another.
In the end, you cannot continue to support an outmoded business model with legislation and regulation (if this worked in the past it certainly won't work in a "Global Economy").
This is VERY Good News (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is VERY Good News (Score:2)
Re:This is VERY Good News (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think its mere coincidence that the RIAA gives its own people (broadcast radio) a price break when doing internet radio. This has all been a ploy to eliminate non-wealthy competitors and further the profitable (for the RIAA) top-40 format and its handful of artists.
Thanks but not thanks.
Did capitalism take a nap? (Score:5, Insightful)
That made something click, here.
It seems to me that, rather than getting the producer and consumer together to negotiate a fair-market price, the RIAA lobbied to get the government to impose a price.
For how long has the music economy been socialist? Is our intolerance of the RIAA limited to its bullying and selfishness, or can it be extended to this attempt to corrupt the freedom of commerce itself?
--Blair
Re:Did capitalism take a nap? (Score:2)
For quite a while. This is hardly their first attack on the free market. The DMCA and whatever the SSSCA is called this week are blatantly anti-capitalist; their primary goal is to use government guns to protect their outdated business models from new competitors.
Re:Did capitalism take a nap? (Score:3, Insightful)
To reiterate: This is not the government propping up the RIAA with subsidies. If the RIAA had their way, there would be no fee at all, because they would only license content to their subsidiaries. The government steps in on behalf of independent broadcasters to force the RIAA to license to everyone, and they are arguing over how much the cost of that should be.
It depends on your definition of socialism (Score:2)
Since the music economy has taken something that was completely free (as in freedom) for the first 3 million years of humanity's existence, and locked it down under copyright for the last couple of centuries or so, one answer (in which socialism is defined as a government mandated, command economy
Essentially ever since we started granting authors and publishers artificial monopolies on their works in the, possibly misguided, assumption that it was necessary in order to foster creativity and expand the public commons (centuries of opposing evidence containing such greats as Michealangelo, Bach, Mozart, and William Shakespear nothwithstanding). So long as the government is using its coercive powers to impose scarcity and restriction where no such natural barriers exist, we will have a media economy that is, effectively, a command economy.
It should come as no surprise that the parties involved in a command economy have to go to the government to have their rates set and their operating parameters defined. "Free" in any sense of the word, be it market, price, or freedom, has little if anything to do with the situation our approach to artistic compensation via monopoly copyrights has created.
Good news indeed (Score:2)
Bad for indepent music (Score:2)
Of course, if people start listening to non-RIAA stuff online, the RIAA will rethink their royalty system.
Re:Bad for indepent music (Score:3, Interesting)
You would be surprised how many decent artists never get picked up by the cartel.
NPR Coverage (Score:4, Informative)
Same Rates as Broadcasters! (Score:4, Interesting)
Webcasters want the same rates as normal broadcasters. That is, they pay a percentage of gross sales.
So, if an Internet radio station has sales of zero, then they pay zero. If they have gross sales of a million bucks, then they pay the same fee as broadcasters that have gross sales of 5 million dollars.
Good news... but (Score:4, Interesting)
Check http://www.kurthanson.com/ for more info. (Score:4, Interesting)
Found both of these links at WFMU [wfmu.org], aka numero uno webcasting radio station in the world.
Gotta love the fact that the RIAA wants to see that webcasters pay fees on top of the ASCAP/BMI fees that "real" radio stations do without getting any of the payola.
At any rate, it'll be interesting to see what the Librarian of Congress does in the next 30 days.
Whatever happened to MBONE? (Score:3, Interesting)
Or something remotely like that.
Anyway, it seemed like a terrific idea, 'cause the content provider wouldn't have to server a thousand different, unique streams, all with the same content -- it'd just send a single stream to an MBone address, and anyone who wanted to receive it could ask for it.
I just did a quick check on it, and only found 6-year-old FAQs and such. Has it died? Has it been overcome by events with IPv6?
I ask 'cause it occurred to me that any webcaster broadcasting on mbone wouldn't be *able* to tell how many people were listening. A sort of end-run around some of CARP, as it were...
Re:Whatever happened to MBONE? (Score:3, Informative)
Marshal Eubanks of Multicast Tech [multicasttech.com] did an interview on cnet radio (go here [online-tonight.com] and search for multicast) he was pretty optimistic about multicast being deployed. He gave the startling figure that 20% of broadband users had access to the multicast internet. I was shocked by this because I have scoured the 'net looking for a consumer isp that would offer it to consumers and haven't found anything. Anyone have any info?
Re:Whatever happened to MBONE? (Score:2)
I've asked a few Internet2 people about multicast, and while the backbone certainly is, the "last mile" to users often is not.
I was recently working for a company that was delivering multicast webcasts from major streaming providers over satellite to ISPs. But most of us were laid off, I don't know what is going on now.
There are a few companies to help you get going with multicast such as Multicast Technologies [multicasttech.com]. Also the GEANT [dante.net] network in Europe is multicast capable. And here is a list of active SDR [ucsb.edu] listings, kind of a "tv guide" for multicast.
Encouraging people into piracy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Don't screw the customers, or the customers will screw you.
Newsbytes article (Score:4, Interesting)
YAY (Score:2)
StreamRipper (Score:3, Interesting)
Current CARP rejected, ruling due in 30 days. (Score:4, Informative)
We hope this means that the Librarian has realized that not all current parties were properly represented at the CARP hearings, and the proposed rates and reporting requirements were unreasonable and did not represent a market rate.
Webcasters want a royalty rate that is fair and equitable to all sides - a rate based on revenues, in the 3% range, much like the royalties paid to the composers of the songs now through ASCAP and BMI. The rejected proposal would have killed the market by wiping out most if not all of the industry.
Webcasters also want reduced reporting requirements - Song Name, Artist, Album and Label where available. Not the 25 or so data points asked for by the RIAA.
We do not know what will happen next. This ruling may even mean that another CARP hearing will be held, this time we hope it will be more accessible to small internet broadcasters. (Previous CARPs required all participants to share the costs associated with it, which came out to about $300,000 for each participant.)
But internet broadcasters are happy that we can stay on the air for another 30 days. If the decision went the other way, many stations would have started shutting down this week.
Looking for info (Score:2)
Does anyone have a link to the this argument?
Should be good for a few laughs.
-
spin doctoring (Score:3, Interesting)
My favorite quote:
In recent weeks, the CARP rates have become the subject of an intense misinformation and propaganda campaign (so called "grassroots" but really ginned up by sophisticated lobbyists in D.C.)
nahhh it's not grass roots... it's ginned up by sophisticated lobbyists!
Hil Rosenator is smoking some crack if she expects people to really believe this but it is interesting. Whom did they have in mind?
Well later on in the document they specifically name MTV, Microsoft, AOL/TW. With the exception of MTV (who's parent company may have some quarrels with RIAA) it seems like technology vs. copyright all over again. I just wish the tech companies would realize they are fighting this together and publicly unify against RIAA and other media hordes (whores?) who have clearly put aside internal bickering to concentrate on world domination through Project "Nickle and Dime" the fuck out of everyone.
The Cost of Delay, and the cost of RIAA music (Score:3, Interesting)
It is clear to me that any and all delay in the process helps the RIAA members and harms the webcasters for two reasons: During the three-and-a-half (so far) years wait for the price of music to be set, it has been impossible for a webcaster to make a real business plan, to create a spreadsheet that describes their business in numbers, to pitch potential investors, or to sign any serious contracts with advertisers or other funders, thus crippling the fledgling industry. On the other hand, the record industry needs lots of time to get their act together to move in with their own outfits.
As a webcater, I am coming to realize that unlike most of the people in broadcasting, I am a BUYER and not a freeloader. I am going to demand some respect from any label trying to get on my station. Tribute even.
I am afraid that the RIAA is going to price their member's works out of the market. If I can buy gas at one station for $1.50 or go next door and pay $15.00, where do you think I will tend to pull in to fill up?
Today I was on Paul Allen's TechTV when the statement from the Librarian of Congress came out. I deleted a RIAA member property song from the play rotation on my station, on camera, and they aired it! Click Click "Well, no royalties for Lowen and Navarro, no promotion, no exposure, no airplay, no CD sales. Too bad. Too expensive."
Re:As pointed out in a previous discussion... (Score:4, Insightful)
However now that the record industry has it's lobbying worked out congress suddenly realised that internet radio is really about stealing from the record industry instead of promotion.
Parent
Re:an accounting nigthmare (Score:2)
They would have to do the same thing in an international forum to get similar type numbers...and I doubt that they are willing to spend the money to do so.
ttyl
Farrell