Copyright Office Rejects CARP Recommendations

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.

College radiostation's view

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an air of relief for our college radiostation, because for a long time Internet has been our primary broadcasting medium. We were getting ready to find ways to recover our outreach, if our Internet outlet was cut off by CARP's rates.

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..)

Good, but...

[Sc00ter]

As much as CARP sucks, there needs to be some form of payment for commercial internet radio stations to some degree. Otherwise this would give the internet radio stations and advantage over the normal stations. I don't see why they just couldn't use the same ASCAP/BMI stuff that they use for normal radio and apply it to internet radio also.

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.

Same Rates as Broadcasters!

[zentec]

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

[tezzery]

This is definitely good news. At least it proves that the copyright office won't be easily swayed by the RIAA's demands. As far as the whole independent music thing goes, i believe it's a very good thing for independent music.. in the longrun that is. The bad thing is that if the approved rates are outrageous, the only stations that will be able to afford them are the ones backed by big companies such as broadcast.com and spinner.. etc. which is pretty much the same thing that happened to FM radio with monsters like clearchannel buying out all the small stations. They're the reason why there's 5 cookie-cutter station formats around the country. The good thing is that maybe this is a wake-up call to artists/labels and independent stations/media. Maybe it's finally time to move away from cookie-cutter programming and pay attention to independent labels and artists.. We've already made a big move with the Internet by overcoming the RIAA's monopoly with distributors, and college/internet stations have always done it to a certain extent.. True, at first listeners might not pay attention to it. But give it a few years.. This is only the beginning.

Re:Good, but...

[sphix42]

>>there needs to be some form of payment for commercial internet radio stations to some degree. Otherwise this would give the internet radio stations and advantage over the normal stations

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).

Check http://www.kurthanson.com/ for more info.

[dave-fu]

kurthanson.com [kurthanson.com] is the homepage for the Radio and Internet Newsletter (RAIN), a fine spot for up-to-date information on what's going on in the world of webcasting.
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?

[dschuetz]

As an aside, whatever happened to the multicast backbone? I seem to recall that "they" were working on some kind of an IP-level packet redistribution service (my words) that would enable an application to tell its closest router "hey, I wanna listen to 244.123.45.6", and it'd then ask it's upstream router the same thing, etc., until it was able to get a copy of the stream routed to the requesting client.

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:Why is this backwards?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could your ignorance of the broadcasting system get any worse? 1) The radio stations need to play the songs to get people to listen. Why? So they can show their current and future advertisers that they have the ears that make it worth while for them to pay the station money to run the ads. This ad money is what keeps the station alive. Ads pay for everything, employee salaries and song royalties. To the station, the ability to play a popular song is a need, a resource, and is worth paying for. 2) In fact the big music companies already routinely pay up front to have their latest songs played. But not all songs, just the new ones and only for a period of time.

It's a very complex and timeworn system. The only outrageous thing here was the disproportionate level of net broadcasting royalties compared to over the air. If the royalties were lowered to be the same as on-air. The broadcasters would be more than happy to pay them to increase their ears and so their ad revinue.

Newsbytes article

[EReidJ]

Here [washingtonpost.com] is a Newsbytes story on the ruling. A little bit more hard-news information about the decision and its likely impact.

StreamRipper

[Tommy_S]

The nice thing about internet radio is the ability to use something like StreamRipper and save every song, properly named and tagged, as a .mp3 file. I've been doing a lot of this recently as it appeared internet radio was perhaps about to end and I wanted to snatch up a bunch of the music while I still had the chance. I'm on a high speed connection, so last week for a couple days I was actually running 5 instances of StreamRipper at once, each connected to a different "radio station". Within just a couple work days I had snagged multiple gigabytes of 128kbit mp3 files. I think what I've just described is why the RIAA and such are making such a fuss.

Re:Bad for indepent music

[MillionthMonkey]

I started listening to 3wk.com at work recently for the hell of it and was surprised to find out how different it was. First of all, unlike FM, there are no noisy stretches of cheesy LOUD and painful commercials from local businesses like tire salesmen and ripoff dating services. Once in a while a guy with a creepy voice comes on and gives a little spiel about the RIAA and how you should write your Senator, but that's it. And instead of hearing the same mass marketed tiny selection of force-fed boy band / Britney Spears garbage that every FM station pummels you with over and over again, I didn't recognize many of the songs at all. I think it is a mixture of RIAA and non-RIAA artists. Some of it was crap. But a few songs were were really good, enough that I wrote down the artist/album/song title that the site displays while each song is playing. For about half of them, you don't even need a spyware-riddled p2p client to find MP3s- just use Google to find the band's web site and download MP3s right from there completely legally. You can hear what each track on their album sounds like before you decide whether or not to buy it.

You would be surprised how many decent artists never get picked up by the cartel.

I've had it with the RIAA

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a musician, and I have been approached by various studios to be recorded or whatever. I for one am getting REALLY tired of watching no talent people getting rich off of other people's talents. If you want to support your favorite musician, go to their shows. THAT is where they make their money. A band only gets about $1-3 dollars per $20 CD. So every time you buy a CD you're paying on average $18 for executives to tell you what's good and what's not AND to pay for the RIAA to "buff" politicians and beaurocrates (I know I spelled it wrong) to pass laws that are like what they are trying to do right now.

Don't get me wrong. I buy the CDs of bands I like, but those are few these days since there are so many bands putting out 1 good song and the rest suck.

There is a bright side to all this. With the advent of the internet and P2P software, bands that have the desire and talent can make it without a recording studio. Nickelback is an EXCELLENT example of that. Granted their site is on NT and isn't working because of NT (and many of it's so called admins, not ALL NT admins are bad, don't get me wrong) doesn't work properly. But if I'm not mistaken, they have made it big without the help of any recording label even though they appear to be with one now. So I say, look around, find the music you like in whatever means you like, JUST DON'T BUY CDS!! Screw the recording studios. Don't give them money to try to make laws making everything in this world more difficult.

I say again, this is from a musician that has almost been signed several times. Musicians make their money on tour, not from the CDs

Re:Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Metropolis isn't part of the RIAA and fully supports non-licensed web broadcasters - cuz it's free publicity. Check em out- good music to boot as well.

http://www.metropolis-records.com/

spin doctoring

[neoThoth]

i'm usually more aware of this type of legislation but was caught off guard by this. So I did some digging at RIAA's site (better to know your enemy) and found this spin control document [riaa.org].

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.

Question: What do broadcasters currently pay?

[Jason Pollock]

I've searched, and I've been unable to find any information telling me what radio stations currently pay to air a song.

Anyone know?

Jason Pollock

The Cost of Delay, and the cost of RIAA music

[gregormarkowitz]

My web station has been on the air for over four years straight. This decision was supposed to have been finalized by the LOC a couple of other times in the last few years, so this delay is no real surprise.

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."

The perils of old age

[Kalvos]

Our show, Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar [kalvos.org] begins its 8th year on Saturday. We've been on line since September of 1995, with RealAudio 1.0.

We've been both broadcast and cybercast (archived, not streamed, for the first few years), and were there three years before the DMCA.

Yes, we were opposed to the CARP rules and gave them our Golden Bruce Award this year [kalvos.org], but we also opposed the DMCA and praised the Dutch rights agency BUMA (which allows imperfect cybercasts with simple licensing, and none at all at low streaming rates.

Our problem has been living through all these issues. We began operating with the understanding that we were a niche program (new nonpop) working as a research site as well as a music site (we won the year 2000 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, even after the DMCA).

But the DMCA contained no grandfathering and had no exceptions for educational/research use. In 1998, before the passage of the law, we started getting releases from composers and labels (which you can read about here) [kalvos.org] as a pre-emptive measure. We didn't receive all of them, which still meant, with the advent of the retroactive CARP rules (see the abbreviated list in a previous post), the impossible requirement to research all our logs, including on computers long out of service and whose logs were long gone.

On average, by my guesswork calculation (where Britney's "I'm a Slave 4 U" and Beethoven's "Missa Solemnis" are both considered "songs") our yearly payment to the RIAA (which does

not

represent most nonpop artists) would have been $5,160, more than a dozen times a typical license for the same 900-watt radio station we broadcast from.

So the Librarian of Congress's rejection of CARP is good news, if only for the interim. True commercial cybercasts are another issue, and the DMCA and CARP rules are a burden for them as well; we broadcast and cybercast within the nonprofit/educational arena (on a community station with volunteer staff) and also provide a true research site, but CARP swept us in with the rest.

I don't offer any new insights here, only a sense of relief, and a place to say them.

Dennis Bathory-Kitsz
"Kalvos" of Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar [kalvos.org]