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Music Media

National Association of Broadcasters Sues RIAA 82

Posted by Hemos from the going-after-the-folks dept.
LordNimon writes "Someone is suing the RIAA and not the other way around! CNET is reporting that the National Association of Broadcasters has sued the RIAA to prevent them from forcing radio stations to pay special royalities if they stream their signals over the Internet. Apparently, the stations don't pay the RIAA for normal broadcast, so they don't understand what's so special about Internet broadcasts. " Interesting twist - I expect to see TV stations and affiliates getting into the same arguement over Internet streaming - sorta an extension of the whole iCrave thing.
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National Association of Broadcasters Sues RIAA More

National Association of Broadcasters Sues RIAA

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  • Hmm (Score:2)

    by jms ( 11418 )
    Interesting ... if the NAB succeeds, then an internet radio broadcaster might be able to avoid paying the higher royalties by licensing and setting up a small, low power radio station out in the middle of nowhere, and broadcasting the program to the local cows.

  • No Title (Score:4)

    by chandler ( 98984 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:24AM (#1162470) Homepage
    Ok, does anybody understand the ideas behind the DMCA? It's digital, therefore it's bad - that's the idea, and that's what makes Internet brodcasting special. I suppose that if I wanted to, I could redirect an internet brodacast to a file, kill the ads, and listen at my pleasure. I wouldn't want to - it'd be crazy.


    On another note - I just thought of this - does the DMCA make broadcasting concerts over HDTV illegal or difficult, because it's digital quality? Just a thought.

    "The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

  • From the article:
    The broadcasters yesterday asked a U.S. District Court in New York to rule that sending over-the-air radio signals with recorded music to the Web is no violation of "digital performance" rights under a 1998 copyright law.... The 1998 digital copyright law affects Internet radio stations but not those that broadcast over the air.

    Is this the DMCA? What law are they referring to here?
    ---
  • With their flapping heads etc..
  • What goes around comes around. The RIAA just stepped in it a lil too deep.

  • Free Cows Deserve Free Radio (Score:3)

    by WillAffleck ( 42386 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:29AM (#1162474)
    ... an internet radio broadcaster might be able to avoid paying the higher royalties by licensing and setting up a small, low power radio station out in the middle of nowhere, and broadcasting the program to the local cows.

    Cool concept! How about Montana, which has a dearth of Techno and Rave stations? And just think of the lucky cows in KMOO's reach, able to bop to the trance beats of euro sounds!

    They can take our milk, they can turn us into hamburgers, they can herd us, but they can never take our Freedom!

  • Unfortunately, however, it is not that easy. Currently there are no liscenses available for low-power stations and there are no guidelines, yet you need a liscense to operate a station. Nice catch-22, eh? Check out Radio Free Berkeley to see what progress they're making in fighting the FCC on this issue. To get a station legally you will have to pony up the bigbucks and buy one from one of the media giants that currently owns it... Related question, though: Do nonprofit radio stations (ie non-commercial or educational) stations currently have to pay any royalties to the RIAA? What about net-based non-profits? Just curious...
  • Yeah for the NAB. I'll actually have to switch on the radio in my car now!

  • To be the devil's advocate here... (Score:4)

    by pq ( 42856 ) <rfc2324&yahoo,com> on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:31AM (#1162477) Homepage
    Well, I mean the RIAA's advocate, but same difference, eh?

    Apparently, the stations don't pay the RIAA for normal broadcast, so they don't understand what's so special about Internet broadcast

    This argument is rather contrived: what's different (at least from the RIAA's point of view) is that this broadcast stream leads to perfect copies. Yes, you could record tapes (even CDs) from radio broadcasts, but they'd be contaminated by radio propagation and other analog noise. Whereas with the net, you get bit-perfect copies, which are essentially trivial to capture and propagate...

    Now if the radio stations promised to wireless broadcast the music across their studio, then re-digitize it and stream it on the net, I'm sure the RIAA would drop its suit at once... So the "we don't understand what the difference is" is clearly specious. Now should they bend over and let the RIAA screw them, or should they stand up for their freedom to broadcast using the best available technology? That's a different issue, and I'm happy that the NAB appear to be showing some spine, at least for now...

  • Hrm. I hear cow based radio programming is the wave of the future. Cows aren't fickle and they don't mind advertisements one bit.

    Bad Mojo

  • Ironic (Score:5)

    by dew ( 3680 ) <david@week l y .org> on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:32AM (#1162479) Homepage Journal
    Radio broadcasters have been very lucky folks for a long time now: they managed to avoid a recording royalty in public performance for the last 50-odd years, which is somewhat mind-boggling, when you consider that an artist who performs a song that they did not compose does not get a blessed penny no matter how popular her song is on the radio. Only composers get compensated for public performance.

    Then this odd thing happened with the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) -- for the first time ever, a public performance right in audio recordings (versus just the composition) was granted to record labels for webcasts. A number of members of NAB were, IMHO, quite happy, because this is going to make it considerably more difficult for webcasters to survive. (The royalty rate has yet to be decided, but last I checked, the RIAA proposed a figure of 45% of gross sales as the appropriate figure to be paid.)

    It wasn't until they realized that this would really affect them too that they got up in arms. So now we have the bizarre case of them trying to claim exemption from any Internet stream that is also broadcasted over the air: punish them, not us! All of the sudden they want to be special, without realizing that they've stumbled headlong into the RIAA's trap to reclaim those royalties they've been lusting after (perhaps with good cause) for the last five-odd decades.

    Of course this brings up some interesting issues is the exception is accepted: what if I'm broadcasting music over cellular? Does that count? What if I'm using a satellite downlink? If my customers are using micro-FM broadcasting units? Methinks the law is going to get particularly hairy with regards to these technologies (a general truism, perhaps!).

    David E. Weekly [weekly.org]

  • I understand that earlier this year (give or take a few months) the FCC finally decided to grant space on the public airwaves to "microbroadcasters", which they had previously banned. As I understood it, however, particular regulations would apply to this new category of permitted broadcasters. Do you know if royalty rates were set differently for microbroadcasters? (I thought they were, but the topic isn't of particular interest to me, so I could be mistaken.) If they are, your "work-around" proposal probably can't achieve its aim.

  • I thought of this too. However, there is a logical solution - Internet broadcasters pay only for the land area not convered by radio transmisions.

    Yeah, this does lead into some other, odd, conclusions, but it's the only logical solution.

    That's not to say it's fair.

    In the UK, each (electromagnetic) radio station pays a fee to a central board for each piece of music they broadcast, and that depends on the size of the station. (IIRC for a national station, it's ten pounds). I belive that a similar fee is applied for an internet radio station, although the only internet radion operator I know of in the UK is the BBC, which is slightly different anyway.
    --
  • Wait, so the record companies pay radio stations to play records (payola). Payola is deemed illegal (circa mid-1950's if I'm remembering correctly). Now with the popularity of internet streaming radio stations, the radio station has to start paying back the record company?

    Puh-leez. What about radio stations such as WFMU [wfmu.org] (91.1 FM for NYC-area listeners) which are non-commercial yet stream their content on the internet? What about the fact that they sometimes play records that are not only obscure but possibly over 60 years old? Or does this only apply to popular commercial music?

    --

  • No Apples and Oranges (Score:4)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:35AM (#1162483) Homepage Journal
    RIAA is messing up big time by treating one medium different than another. On one hand, a radio station takes a song and beams it out to 50,000 listeners, and on the other hand takes the very same song and streams it out to 50,000 listeners. There's no fundamental difference.

    Because the internet is new, and software still relatively new, people want to treat them differently from the old media. But their purposes are the same. Internet broadcasts must operate under the same rules as EM broadcasts. Software should have the same copyright laws as books. Websites the same as newspapers.

    Because good old-fashioned classic copyright is sufficient for software, the DMCA just creates injustice. On the music side, treating internet and EM differently only creates a loss for RIAA. By doing what their doing, even if they win the case, they end up forcing station to one format or another, ultimately limiting the song's audience. Either charge no royalties or charge for all broadcasts, internet or EM.

    If you base law on fundamental principles then its application can be applied to everywhere, and understood by everyone.
  • But they would still have to pay the RIAA fee for radio broadcasters.

    Over-the-air radio stations pay an annual fee to music publishers through Broadcast Music and the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers.

    And then there's the disadvantage of those cows always calling in and requesting NSYNC. For some reason cattle really like boy bands. Go figure.

  • Re:Hmm (Score:1)

    by hadron ( 139 )
    Unfortunately, they also have a very low disposable income, making them not very attractive to advertisers.
  • Seems like you could average multiple recordings and converge on the true song. I think this would handle noise to an arbitrary degree (more recordings averaged == less noise). I'm not sure about multipath though. Nasty stuff, multipath.
  • Well now, the whole bit about perfect copies isn't quite right, either. Most radio stations I know of that are now broadcasting on the internet are still using things like RealAudio and Liquid audio, which both do, I suppose, allow for a perfect copy to be made, but the cold reality is that most of them still have much worse quality than actual airwave broadcasts.

    The reasons are bandwidth bottlnecks and compression.

    -------

  • Why not play local bands? (Score:3)

    by G27 Radio ( 78394 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:41AM (#1162488)
    If the NAB is really so pissed off at the RIAA, then why is it that they play so little music that doesn't come from the RIAA? I do understand that the RIAA promotes music heavily so it has a fan base that the radio stations can count on. But would it hurt them to take a chance and start playing more of their local bands that aren't under the control of the RIAA? This is what I can't figure out--why doesn't the NAB encourage it's members to fight back by playing more non-RIAA music and helping promote it themselves? I can understand why a lone radio station would not want to do this--they count on all the promotional stuff they get from RIAA labels. But if they acted in concert (no pun) couldn't they hit the RIAA pretty hard and at the same time reduce their dependence

    numb
  • The concern is as much about user friendliness as quality. Taping something off the radio is lower quality, yes, but more importantly from the record company POV is that it's a pain in the neck. Even so, there is a charge attached to every single blank tape sold in the US that feeds back to the RIAA.

    As long as the users has access to a digital feed, some clever person will come up with some software to make it easy to capture that stream, edit it, and add it to your MP3 collection. That's the major concern, and that's why secure music formats like Sony's are user-interface nightmares.

    Of course, it goes without saying that the recording industry is pretty scared of the net right now, and is certainly going to seize any opportunity to use it to increase revenues.

  • Hello? (Score:3)

    by pmodz ( 123700 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:44AM (#1162490)
    Anyone ever listened to live streaming audio over the net? The quality of FM radio is usually MUCH better than some crappy 56k stream being compressed on the fly. Besides, there's still gonna be some jack ass DJ talking over you favorite songs, who the hell wants a "perfect" copy of that?
  • "Whereas with the net, you get bit-perfect copies, which are essentially trivial to capture and propagate..."

    Hehehe! Hahahaha! Hrm. Ok.

    Yes, last time I checked, I thought ShoutCast and Spinner.com et all were doing a great job. Minus the lag. Minus the packet dropping and switching. Minus the advertisements. I would sooner buy a CD than record CRAPPY net music that has been digially manhandled on it's way to my computer. At least when the CD skips, you can clean it.

    Bad Mojo
  • its that its "new" and the recording industry cant control it.

    There are no more insanely high priced barriers to entry, so that means that the companies that have been the only ones that could afford to produce, and distribute music no longer are the only ones that can afford to publish music.

    Now, the controlled distribution channels are beginning not to matter... You can slap a fairly professional track using a multitude of tools, put it on MP3, and then get the track out without investing any money in making physical copies.

    That scares the heck out of the media industry, because it cuts them out of the loop, so they dont get any money.

    DOnt believe for a second that this is about sales of existing works or "piracy" its about control. period.

  • Re:No Title (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They really stepped in it this time. I could tape-record broadcast radio to DAT, delete the ads, whatever. Basically, no one who has money to buy stuff is interested in doing it. When I was 15 and had no money and plenty of time I did a lot of 'home taping', but mostly because the shitty record stores in my area didn't carry the misfits or minor threat or whatever the hell I wanted. When I have money, it's not worth my time. And if I don't have the money, those pirates at the record companies aren't losing a sale, so they don't have to be mad about losing a chance at cheating bands. Get lost.

    On a more fun note, I seem to remember recent rules opening up the ability to do micropowered stations in some areas, or opening up parts of the spectrum to non-commercial micro-powered stations (the whole FCC limited-resource argument for locking up a public good for the benefit of a few companies and instituting wholesale censorship in the US having been bullshit originally and pathetically out-of-date now, much like eugenics, which was also popular back them), just so that you could have a micro-powered broadcast allowing you to skirt these rules about internet broadcast.

    Although, I seem to remember looking into the RIAA rules, and they weren't all that much different from regular radio rules. Except now they stepped on the wrong feet.

  • micro radio stations (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually the FCC is currently finalizing plans to license 10,100 and 1000 watt broadcast stations. No mega dollar pricetage to get into broadcasting anymore. reasonable startup, minimal regulations. http://www.fcc.gov/mmb/prd/lpfm/
  • Actually, that's exactly why they do it. Remember that lack of good personal copies helps radio stations too. I've probably cut my radio listening in half since I figured out how to plug my Rio in the car stereo.

  • Re:To be the devil's advocate here... (Score:4)

    by Arandir ( 19206 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:47AM (#1162496) Homepage Journal
    broadcast stream leads to perfect copies.

    Yes, you are playing devil's advocate here. First of all, the copy is not perfect. Those signals transmitting the digital ones and zeros don't have the exact same amplitude as the original. So what? Consider a book. It is composed of equally discrete numbers and letters. I can make a perfect copy of a book's information with a scanner and OCR. But where's the hue and cry over OCR software?

    Another "so what?" arises over the fact that copyright law (not the hideous DMCA) does not distinguish between perfect and imperfect copies. That concept wasn't introduced into law AFAIK until DMCA. The politicians have pulled this notion of perfect copies out of legal thin air.

  • Digital vs. Analogue false dichotomy for most folk (Score:5)

    by FreeUser ( 11483 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @09:49AM (#1162497)
    I suppose that if I wanted to, I could redirect an internet brodacast to a file, kill the ads, and listen at my pleasure.

    You mean, kind of like you do with a VCR when you're not going to be home for that season premier of Deep Space Nine?

    You can do precisely the same thing with a hauppauge card and a traditional radio broadcast, namely record any broadcast you like with no appreciable quality loss between what your ears hear the first time (listening to the live braodcast) and the second time (listening to the recording on your hard drive, assuming a lossless storage format).

    The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.

    Casual users have had an effective means of making "perfect" copies for 20 years now, namely cassette tapes. For most poeple's purposes these constitute "perfect" copies, and are used (and traded) as such. The internet hasn't changed that fact appreciably, even if it has made trading a little more convinient.

    Big time commercial pirates do benefit, but then, they too have had the means of making "perfect" copies for nigh unto 20 years, using prosumer and professional studio and CD pressing equipment.

    The laws prior to the DMCA were more than sufficient to deal with both, and still are. Big time (or even small time) commercial pirates get busted, have their assets seized, spend time in jail, and so on. Casual users share music and, as often as not, go ahead and buy the CD anyway, either for convinience sake, as a collector, as gifts, or simply because they want the the cover art along with the music.

    Whether someone records a song (complete with DJ talkover) or other braodcast from traditional radio or from internet radio makes absolutely no difference, either in terms of the final storage medium (tape vs. hard drive), format (analogue, .wav, .mp3, ...), or behavior (to share or not to share).

    It is only a few technophiles like us that really get excited about DIGITAL storage -- everyone else is perfectly happy with lossy mp3 format, lossy cassette tapes, and lossy VHS, and no amount of posturing on the part of the RIAA or the MPAA is going to change that.

  • If they win (Score:3)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxrubyNO@SPAMcomcast.net> on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @10:00AM (#1162498)
    The fundamental question is one of reproducing an original. The only debate is the form that original takes. They are trying to claim that it is ok to "play" a song, as this is not transmitting data. Transmitting digital data is transmitting digital data.

    If the NAB wins, than they may have cleared the way for "transmitting" other files. Your only left dealing with semantics on what constitutes music, which is nothing more than data. In other words, if they win, we could transmit all sorts of useful data with their same arguement. Wish them the best.

  • The more the song is played on the radio, the more exposure they get, resulting in people buying their records and merchandise. They have everything to gain by letting people broadcast their songs. In fact, I'm sure some bands would pay to have their songs played over the radio. Consider that today, everyone with a computer and a modem can have their own Internet radio station, since it is digital, anyone could copy it. Anything that can be played via computer can be downloaded and saved to a disk and distributed. I don't care what type of copy protection they come up with. Don't expect these lawsuits to end soon, they're just beginning. -Don't Sue People Panda, Where are you!!!!
  • I agree that the situation is ironic.

    However, I don't believe that the NAB should pay royalties to the artists that perform the song, because each time the song is played over the radio it 1)does not cost them any personal effort, and 2) potentially increases their fan base who may then buy the album or attend a real performance. Composers may be different, I could see arguments for why actually writing a song "should" earn you more than performing it, but in the end I don't think that is exactly the issue.

    The RIAA has been screwing consumers for a long, long time, and most of us, being consumers, knew this. What many people are discovering now, or at least what is becoming more widely known, is that the RIAA has also been screwing the artists at the other end for a long long time. I think that what is truly ironic is that one of the groups that they couldn't screw was the radio stations, for the simple reason that the radio stations were the only ones rich/powerful/corporate enough to fight back.

    When you think about it, the radio stations only help the RIAA make more profits anyway - thousands of radio stations all over the country and abroad have to buy their own copies of all the RIAA songs to play, often in the more expensive single format or full CDs or remixes or all of the above. (I'm sure they must get discounts, but I'm betting that the RIAA protects their profit margin.) They don't make thier money (the radio stations, that is) directly off the music they play, just the ads they put in between. And then the artists get heard all over the world, causing people to like them and want their recordings. Therefore, what I feel is ironic is that of the three groups I've mentioned that help the RIAA (consumers, artists, and radio stations), only the entity big enough to fight back has been spared a righteous screwing - up till now.

    Personally, I just hope the RIAA keeps shooting itself in the foot enough to get more of these entities that can actually fight it to be as angry as we are.

    Beefcake. BEEFCAAAAKE!!!
  • and they are requesting the music they want to hear.... sorta like my.mp3.com, but they don't even have to own the music. But, if you call it a radio station and stream it over the internet, does that mean you don't have to pay for it?

  • Re:What law is this? (Score:3)

    by Wah ( 30840 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @10:14AM (#1162502) Homepage Journal
    Of course, that's another reason why it sucks so bad. Not only does it make it illegal to fairly use the media you buy, it incorporates new rules on digital media. That's why they put in the Digital Millenium Copyright act, so they could set up special copyrights for digital media. What you fear, you try to destroy.

    It's about control (because control gets you $$$), Lobbying is an investment.

    Here's a good link [ucla.edu] that outlines some its special provisions, (sarcasm) note how many of them are there to protect consumers (/s>
    --
  • Well, you might want to hear your favorite DJ's show. Even if they're on at 5 PM and you have to work until 6 -- your computer or tape recorder could record it for your later enjoyment.

    Me, I'm waiting to be able to buy a Linux version of RealPlayer Plus with the recording problems [real.com] fixed, so I can record an hour of an overseas news station and improve my foreign language skills...and I need the ads too, so that's not an issue either.

  • Re:Hmm (Score:1)

    by Eccles ( 932 )
    Haven't you ever heard of cash cows? I'd think the advertisers would want to milk them for all they're worth. And they're good tippers too...
  • In fact, I'm sure some bands would pay to have their songs played over the radio.

    In fact they already do, classic example being the Beatles, a more current example being Limp Bizkit. What's funny is that in LB's case their Label actually paid for their airtime. This is an interesting turn of events.

  • The radio station does have to buy the CDs they play. So if I run a station. and buy my own CDs but I'm the only one to listens to it, the music is already paid for. Now the interesting concepts come into play when there is one radio station me, and my friend is the only listener. Am I essentially copying straight over the internet? Yes. Does this kind of broadcast encourage my one listener to buy the song for themselves, No. Is it legal for my friend to record that stream to listen to it later, No. They can record it to analog audio tape, assuming the law treats internet same as FM, which is doesn't yet. So whats the solution, limit the sound quality allowed? No, assume the bands can survive on just selling T-shirts and hats, No. Honestly there is no good answer to these kinds of questions. But interestingly enough true competition generally seems to figure out a way to answer these questions without bringing them to court. So, we will just have to wait and see.

  • Re:Hmm (Score:1)

    by pmc ( 40532 )
    Virgin broadcast as well.
  • Digital Audio Broadcasting is also digital and broadcast using radio. Or doesn't DAB exist in the US yet?
  • Just thought I'd let you know that this made me groan so loudly that the boss is sending me home 'cause he thinks I'm sick...

  • I've got a great idea. (Score:5)

    by Bowie J. Poag ( 16898 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @10:52AM (#1162510) Homepage


    ..How about we spend less fucking time worrying about lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit and go back to having fun?

    None of these lawsuits affect us. The RIAA doesnt affect me. The UCITA doesnt affect me. A lawsuit against Yahoo doesn't affect me. A lawsuit against MP3.com doesn't affect me. None of this shit affects me, because I, and we, will all be able to get our hands on what we want for free, anyway. Laws do not and cannot prevent piracy of any media. Laws -encourage- piracy. Half of you people fail to realize there are piracy groups in existance that are older than you are!

    I've said it before, and i'll say it again. The damn cat is already out of the bag. No amount of lawsuits will put the damn cat back in it.

    For crying out loud, quit worrying, people. If I see another damn RIAA/UCITA/Napster/MP3 lawsuit story on Slashdot i'm going to puke.



    Bowie J. Poag

  • Re:Hmm (Score:1)

    by Eil ( 82413 )
    It was my understanding that the FCC recently passed some sort of directive allowing people to broadcast whatever they wish on lower-power (less than 7 watts, I think) FM with no license required. Being that I'm right next to a city of thousands, I do this in a heartbeat if I wasn't wasting away in a dormitory.

    And AFAIK, most noncommercial / nonprofit / educational radio stations don't broadcast anything that would fall under RIAA's copyrights.
  • "DJ talking over you favorite songs, who the hell wants a "perfect" copy of that?
    The DJ, so she/he can put together an "aircheck" to send to bigger, better paying radio stations.
  • Digital will pretty much always have an advantage of perfect serial copies. Each time you record analog to analog you introduce additional noise as well as pick up some signal degradation. No matter how good your equipment is, the real world physical limits prevent perfect copies using analog equipment.

    On the other hand you could argue that the data stored on your HD is analog, since it's retrieved with basically the same pickups used to store data on cassette. You can look at and interpret the signal with analog equipment, etc.
  • Yes, last time I checked, I thought ShoutCast and Spinner.com et all were doing a great job. Minus the lag. Minus the packet dropping and switching. Minus the advertisements.

    hmm, you might want to work on your bandwidth. I listen to streaming audio all the time, and yes, there are some weaker signals, but finding a strong one isn't too tough. The one that I've been on lately (TagsTrance [tagstrance.com]) has been flawless, and that's been tested with over 12 hours of coninuous listening. And I've YET to hear an ad. Live365 [live365.com] is another good place to find quality streams.

    --
  • The politicians have pulled this notion of perfect copies out of legal thin air.

    Don't you mean lobbyist's hot air? (which is thin, if you really want to nitpick ;)


    --
  • The micropower radio stations are being contested by the big radio stations who claim that they will interfere with "legitimate" broadcast. So the FCC says yeah to the stations, however Congress may say no because of the Big station lobbyist. The fact that they are suing is a big joke. Their no better than the clowns (RIAA) they are suing. They just want to control the airwaves and force their content only.
  • Actually everybody has the right under law to make low power broadcasts in the commercial frequencies. Like 20 feet or something like that. Probably isn't related though.
  • "This argument is rather contrived: what's different (at least from the RIAA's point of view) is that this broadcast stream leads to perfect copies. " WRONG!!!!! MP3 is a *lossy* compression algorithm. It throughs out signal quality to decrease file size and tranfer times. MP3's (and any other format that is practical for Internet musci) does NOT create perfect digital copies. (Although, to be fair, it does produce pretty damn good copies!!)
  • Not so much; they buy CDs for convenience, but generally they get their music for free from the record companies.

    They send out CDs full of music every week.
  • i just wonder - when was the last time you tried to copy, hell - even listen to anything from the net? the quality is poor. shoutcast/realaudio/liquidaudio - all of them suck over an average connection. quality is poor, very often interrupts occur and your player has to take 3 seconds to re-buffer. and no, i'm not using a modem - i'm on a fairly clean t1.
  • This argument is rather contrived: what's different (at least from the RIAA's point of view) is that this broadcast stream leads to perfect copies. Yes, you could record tapes (even CDs) from radio broadcasts, but they'd be contaminated by radio propagation and other analog noise. Whereas with the net, you get bit-perfect copies, which are essentially trivial to capture and propagate...

    #1 you can't get perfect CD quality copies via net broadcasts (yet)

    #2 What about Cable Radio? I know their music is CD quality and commercial free. Do they pay roylties? If they don't then that blows the whole perfect copy arguement out of the water.

  • Dana Lyons tried to make some money off the bovine population a while back with the immortal classic "Cows With Guns". Heard it recently? Me neither, except once on the John Boy and Billy show. So much for a new market. On the other hand, they DO make lovely jackets, and the upside is that when you're done taking the skin off you can have a burger.

  • Re:Why not play local bands? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It probably won't happen this way because too many radio stations are owned by corporate entities (Think Jacor broadcasting), and are "formula" based of one sort or another.

    The truly local stations in non-major markets might be able to do this, but they have to be big enough to have their own DJs, and might have to pay ASCAP fees for the local music anyways, but I would bet that many of them operate in markets without broad local music talent or, because they're in small markets, are simply a transmitter fed by a satellite signal, possibly with a local person to pop on periodically with some sort of local content.
  • DAB doesn't exist in the US, except for some small scale experiments by companies.

    Some of is due to political bickering (the FCC took a long time to develop the US DAB standard, and it is lower quality then the European standards), the rest it probably the fault of groups like the RIAA putting it off.

    Remeber the United States took a good 30 years to make FM a true standard -- FM radio was invented in 1931, it did not become mainstream until the early seventies.

    Yes, FM existed during the 1960's, but it was limited to simucasting on both AM/FM, hard rock and really strange pcydellic stuff. Most people during the 1960's were still listening to AM radio.

    Another standard like that is AM Stereo. Released in 1982, one of my car radios had it, although I haven't yet seen it in most common hi-fi gear. At this point AM stereo is kind of silly -- since most FM dominates the radio now days in the US for music -- AM music stations are rare, and usually simulcast their FM relatives.
  • It doesn't matter how much the lobbyists whine and complain, they do not have the power to pass legislation. The fault lies squarely upon the politicians for putting that concept into law.

    But you are right that the politicians did not invent that concept. They only implemented it. I stand humbled.
  • there is a super analog audio format. it's called vinyl.

    a well made vinyl record can have an audio bandwidth as high as 50 kilohertz per channel. compare that to compact disc's paltry 22.05 kilohertz audio per channel. digital recordings lose even more resolution to quantization noise.

    digital is amazingly inefficient in terms of bandwidth utilization. an ordinary telephone line carry 6-8 khz audio just fine in analog mode. convert the audio feed to digital and the same phone line chokes.

    so even though a cd stores just two 22.05 khz audio channels, the digital signal is actually using 3 megahertz of bandwith - enough for a full ntsc video signal. in fact, early digital recorders used videocassettes as the recording medium.

    where digital excels is in error correction - signal errors - also called noise and distortion - can be more easily controlled; digital information is easier to miniaturize - witness the size of a compact disc versus a vinyl record; and digital signals are easier to manipulate - such as the lossy compression seen on minidiscs and mp3s.

  • Except that Radio air-time is the primary method of advertising a recording. People buy the recordings that they hear on the Radio and like.

    Unless things have changed since I was a Radio DJ 25 years ago, Radio stations do not pay for the recordings that they play. The record companies provide them for gratis. They were always marked with "Not for Sale" on labels and jackets to prevent the radio stations from selling records they no longer needed.

    Air-time was so important to the record companies that they often paid DJs (usually in the major markets) to play particular records that they wanted to push. This was known as Payola [history-of-rock.com] and was outlawed in the early 60s.

    Even though there are many more ways to advertise the existence of recordings today than there were when this relationship between record companies and radio stations began, I suspect that radio is still the largest advertising venue for pop music.

    I find it very amusing that the RIAA members are now so greedy that they will openly antagonize their largest propaganda (advertising) providers.

    There is no doubt in my mind that the real purpose of the DMCA is to inflict pay-per-play for all copyrighted material. I hope that this can be stopped.

    It appears that many in congress have forgotten that copyright was intended to be a careful restriction of the first amendment. It is certain that the constitution did not intend to give such sweeping control of copyrighted material to the copyright holders. I doubt that the DMCA can stand up to a constitutional test in the Supreme Court. A comment above notes that no previous copyright law has ever distinguished between 'perfect' or 'imperfect' copies. This notion in the DMCA should be challenged as being irrelevant to copyright law.


    -- hgc

  • The concern is as much about user friendliness as quality. Taping something off the radio is lower quality, yes, but more importantly from the record company POV is that it's a pain in the neck.

    Funny, I've never had much difficulty. Hit Tuner, hit Tape Monitor, insert tape and hit Record. Difficult if you want a specific song, but if you just want to grab a bunch of music it's easy. A friend ofmine used to record techno off of Live 105 in the San Francisco bay area this way.


    ---
    Zardoz has spoken!

  • Re:Lawsuitapalooza (Score:3)

    by SpacePunk ( 17960 ) on Wednesday March 29, 2000 @02:02PM (#1162529) Homepage
    Absolutely, but it takes years of classes to learn the proper technique of crawling on your belly, the etiquitte of bottom feeding, and blowing smoke up people's butts to make a good lawyer.

  • The digital vs. analogue argument is simple misdirection, an effort for entities like the MPAA and the RIAA to gain even more draconian authority over the products they sell us, and how we are permitted to use them in our own homes, using the spectre of "perfect" recording capabilities by the masses as a boogeyman.

    I just noticed that, by basing their arguments on the claim that digital technology is "worse" (for them) because it allows copying without generational loss, they are really pushing another hidden assumption on us: they make it sound like the casual copying that people have been doing all this time with analog media was okay only because there was generational loss. Or rather, that they were just being nice and letting us get away with it because the generational loss prevented it from doing any real damage. This carries a heavy connotation of "Okay, kids, we've been going easy on you long enough, but it's time you started playing fair now, so no more copying. 'Mkay?" Also, like the story a while back about them "allowing" DJs to use MP3 rippings of their own collections, it implies that they are an authority that is capable of "allowing" or "disallowing" such things in the first place.

    As far as I'm concerned, how effectively I'm able to copy the music has nothing to do with how wrong it is to do so (which is a separate question). How badly it hurts them is irrelevant to me: if copying is wrong, it's wrong, and if not, not. Being digital doesn't make it any more or less wrong, even if the impact on them is different.


    David Gould
  • Suck it down, punk ass bitches! :)

    Rofl, this headline nearly threw me out of my chair when I first read it. I'd love to see the look on their faces when hearing that someone's finally mad as hell, and they're not gonna take it anymore!

    Seems the RIAA finally gets what they deserve. I got r3wt on all j00r b0x0rs! I 0wn j00!

    Hacksworth

  • ...A reason to love lawyers.
  • Your assuming that the people in the RIAA have any clue about music. Since I suspect they don't I also suspect that as far as they can tell an MP3 is just as good as digital master. They might be able to tell the differnce between a CD and mpg123 /dev/random.

    If the RIAA is so good for artitst, then why are there so few live bands playing in the US? Since moving to Oz I've been going to go see live bands at least once a week. Within a ten minute walking distance of my house I have a chose of about 200 live venuses a week. Some of them are on my web page.



  • Truncated Irish, actually. One of my ancestors about 200 years ago dropped the "ue" off the end of the name "Pogue" and threw an A to prevent him from being tagged as a Frenchman. The story goes, that he settled in a largely Irish-dominated community in the Carolinas, and couldn't find work with a French-sounding name. So he changed it.

    Sorry to disappoint you, but, I was not named after a bisexual transvestite pop star. My first name, Bowie, was chosen out of a book, according to my mom. She adds that David Bowie only became popular a few months after I was born, and had she known that, she wouldn't have picked "Bowie" as a name--She would have chosen "Beowulf" instead.

    According to mom, there were too many parents naming their kids "Mike" and "Dave" and common-sounding names, so, she gave me something unique.

    Dad didn't like the name "Bowie", but wen't along with it after mom insisted on it.

    Since I was still in-utero in late '73 and the first 6 months of '74, I wasn't able to voice my opinion. I did kick alot, tho.



    Bowie J. Poag
  • hey, no prob, Dave. See ya 'round. hehe.

    --
  • Pefect copies? The only stations I listen to are 24 kilobit, and I keep losing my connection. Not much better than normal radio, except for content.

    At least for me.
  • When you think about it, the radio stations only help the RIAA make more profits anyway - thousands of radio stations all over the country and abroad have to buy their own copies of all the RIAA songs to play, often in the more expensive single format or full CDs or remixes or all of the above. (I'm sure they must get discounts, but I'm betting that the RIAA protects their profit margin.)

    Radio stations typically get free promo copies of CDs/singles/etc., both for airplay, and for giveaways. Mostly this is for "current product" (i.e., the shite the record company rep is pushing right now for airplay). Sometimes, though, if you have a decent relationship with your rep, they'll even get you some free "catalog" (i.e., older stuff).

    I used to work in radio back in the 80s. I don't miss it all that much, though.

    New XFMail home page [slappy.org]

    /bin/tcsh: Try it; you'll like it.

  • hmmm, you do have a point, direct tv has radio like channels... and they dont have any ad's...

    i dont think they do. will have to ask my dtv dealer.


    nmarshall
    #include "standard_disclaimer.h"
    R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE
  • CDs have 16-bit resolution - one part in 65536,
    That is a signal to quantisation noise level of 100dB+
    Vinyl has a S/N ratio of 50dB if you have a perfect pressing and play it on a $20,000 deck in a vacuum mounted in gimbals.

    Or are you claiming that mass-stamped vinyl is accurate to 10 nanometers?

    As to 50KHz frequency range that gives a mean horizontal resolution of a micron or so; more believeable, but hardly likely to make it though a mechanical tranducer and back out through a speaker unblemished.

    As your ears have afrequency response that tails off around 18 KHz, but amplitude sensitivity of about 80dB, CDs are usually making a better tradeoff.

    I don't know what digital sound you have been listening to over a phone line, but DSL lets the same line carry uncompressed CD-quality audio with ease, or full-motion video with stereo sound using compression.

    Modems suck because they are converting digits to squeaks and bleeps to pass through analogue switching (and, these days, digital switching at 8kHz sample rates).
  • I'm not really concerned about this lawsuit - it's another, beautiful "head-in-the-sand"-stunt, but it might actually work in somebodys favour:

    If the RIAA through this - and similar lawsuits - manages to put enough restraints on the material produced by its members, it will eventually become so difficult/expensive to use what is currently mainstream musical material, that people will look to other alternatives for filling up their webpages, radiostreams or whatnot.

    This could be exactly the kind of opportunity that off-label or independent artists need to gain a foothold; "Sure, you can stream Madonna on your Internet radio station and pay an arm and a leg for it, but then again, you can also stream this very excellent song for free - who cares if nobody's heard of the artist today, it's great music, and she might as well be huge tomorrow"...

    My message is that the more successful the RIAA is in clamping down on music "piracy" on the Internet, the less successful RIAA-generated content will be - provided that there is an alternative source for quality content. And there really is a lot of good stuff out there, even though it needs to be arranged a bit better...

    Like, what if the Slashdot-process was applied on legal mp3s? We've done a shot at this - take a look at Repliq [repliq.net]!

  • In theory I agree with you, however there are some good reasons to worry if you look ahead further than what you'll be doing tomorrow.

    The trouble is that while you're having fun with your head in the sand, some of the most ignorant and bullishly arrogant people (some call them politicians ;-) are being pressed and pursuaded by companies with lots of money to install rules to make what you call "fun" so illegal you can go to prison for 6 times your lifetime for "borrowing" a few sound files.

    As long as people with the right kind of common sense about what is reasonable and what is out of proportion (wrt punnishment and crime) in the new Internet world are driving public opinion and, more importantly, the opinion of politicians, there is a chance things will not be so bad when the next generation will grow up.

    Of course, I may be wrong in my observations of the US political system, but then again I'm Dutch...

    So my advice is: get your head out of the sand and start pursuading people. But do keep having fun while you can!

  • In the interests if health and safety, i should point out that milk isnt *that* good for you... http://www.notmilk.com/
  • >What about the fact that they sometimes play records that are not only obscure but possibly over 60 years old?

    copyright expires over time. This goes for books (Project Gutenberg makes use of this) and also goes for music. when it's old enough it becomes public domain. unfortunately music has changed a lot more than literature has, so not everyone will want to listen to XX year old music.

    //rdj
  • I wasn't agreeing with what I said - I was giving the additude. The person who wrote the article didn't understand how the RIAA thinks.

    "The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."
  • The above post could lead you to believe no royalties are ever paid - that's not exactly true. In the US, commercial radio stations pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI. These are doled out to the copyright owners based on some sampled estimate of airplay.
  • CDs have 16-bit resolution yes. in theory that should give you 90 db dynamic range. but ADCs are hard to design. most lose the least significant bits. and since pulse code modulation is linear you loose 5.625 db dynamic range with each error bit. plus the distortion these errors cause sounds awful. then you have problems of click jitter (did you know that clock crystal rates change with temperature?) so digital recorders add dither. dither is pink noise added to the signal to make sure the least significant bits are always lit. the bits are then removed later through signal processing. so now cd doesn't have quite the sn ratio that's been advertised. now as for vinyl's ability to record ultra high frequency sounds. the pits pressed into the surface of a cd are small. but the high frequencies inscribed into the surface of a record are smaller still -- often smaller than a single wavelngth of light. back in the '80s a manufacturer designed and built a optical record playing system. it used a laser to read the grooves of a record. the system had to use interferometry because the information in the grooves was too small for the laser to read. the machine cost a fortune to build. diamond styli can read those grooves. contact line diamonds have a thin knife edge that is indeed smaller than the finest grooves in a record. an yes, those mechanical systems are capable of preserving and recording those high frequency sounds. and truntables that can achive good sound cost less than $1,000. your the roll-off argument has been used by digital recording apologists for years and it still doesn't hold water. if you want to make sure that your recording will have good frequency response at 18 khz, you have to make sure that it has the ability to extend far beyond that. by your argument, 3d games don't have to bother with more than 25 frames per second because that's all our eyes need to perceive continuous motion. gamers know better. finally, can dsl carry cd quality sound? well, to carry uncompressed cd audio you need a bit more than 1.4 kilobits per second (16-bits per sample * 2 channels * 44,100 samples per second). i suppose that could be carried by 1.5 kilobit dsl line or a t1 line. but there's not much room left for communications overhead or for replacing lost packets. and then you have dsl's 3 mile limit. my original argument still stands. digital is inefficient at delivering continuous analog material like audio or video. for example, fm radio delivers two 15 khz channels (limited to 15 khz for political, not technical reasons), and two 8 khz subcarrier channels, all within about 100 khz of bandwidth. to do the same in the digital domain you'd need between 1.5 and 2 megahertz of bandwidth. to reduce the bandwidth necessary for digital broadcasts, you need to use lossy compression, an unacceptable tradeoff for critical listening.
  • If they win though, I think the whole iCrave thing should be looked at again. iCrave wasn't doing anything wrong, and when you consider the amount of people who actually went to the site because they didn't get those channels, the potential for hits is crazy.
    Think about it? Where I live we don't get UPN, having that on the net would be cool. The same would be for people living outside the US. You know they only get 4 channels in England and they are boring as hell.
    The potential for world wide coverage is very real.

    Same with the Radio stations, having listeners world wide would give them a whole new listener base. And they have been doing it for the past couple years without dealing with this crap.
    The RIAA should get lost.
  • Well,as my dear Mother would say,what goes around comes around.Watch and see if the NAB gets sued next.Would not suprise me at all.
  • For crying out loud, quit worrying, people.

    I worry about these lawsuits for a couple of reasons.

    (1) Some day, I might do something which seems perfectly innocuous to me, but which offends an entrenched interest who decides to take me to court. The only way I can prevent that is by understanding who gets sued and why, and acting to voice my outrage when I think a suit is offensive.

    (2) As an active member of the software development industry, I am interested in trying to find ways that we can increase the quality of the products we are developing, and reduce the stress involved in developing them. Things like UCITA are the wrong way to go, if that is your goal.

    (3) As a citizen who believes, by and large, that the country I live in is one of the most 'progressive' and 'free' societies *in history*, I have an interest in keeping it that way --- and many of these lawsuits will have the opposite effect (as will the type of civil disobedience you seem to be advocating).

    Sure, I can stick my head in the sand. But that buys me a moment's comfort at the cost of the battle.
  • Somebody get this man a *huge* barf bag - he's gonna need it. Slashdot - news about lawsuits, every day.

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