Copyright Office Proposes Webcasting Regs

deadsquid writes: "Streaming to a desktop near you, the death knell of online radio stations. Continuing to pave the money trail the RIAA and others claim to be theirs and theirs alone, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel has released their ideas on what webcasters should pay to re-broadcast copyrighted material over the Internet. A good summary can be found at the Radio and Internet Newsletter, which provides an outline of what hoops net broadcasters must jump through, in addition to what they must pay. To say the rates are ridiculous is an understatement, and the amount of information required from the broadcaster to the copyright holder is ludicrous. The cost of bandwidth and delivery is already high enough, and this ruling, if upheld, kinda removes any hope of surmounting operating costs and continuing on. " Webcasters will have to report a great deal of information about their listeners according to the reporting requirements that the Copyright Office has proposed.

I thought I'd just summarize briefly for people who don't follow these issues:

Copyright law gives the record companies the right to prevent others from making copies of "their" music, except in certain cases where there is a "compulsory license" written into the law. In these cases, the record companies can't prevent anyone from using "their" music, but there is a mandatory fee that they must get paid. This "compulsory license" scheme was meant to keep the music industry from taking over the radio industry by simply refusing to license their music to certain radio stations (ones that didn't play ball, naturally). The U.S. Copyright Office sets the fees and revises them occasionally.

So the same idea was applied to webcasting music. In theory, this keeps the record companies from eliminating all-but-one or all-but-a-couple of the webcasters - anyone can webcast, you just have to pay the fee. However, if the record industry has too much influence over the process, they might try things like getting "compulsory license" fees set very high, or making sure that the record-keeping requirements are so onerous that it's impossible to comply with them.

In effect, this eliminates the "compulsory license" - because it's economically infeasible to comply with it. Webcasters can still seek individual licenses from the record companies, but this gets back to the original problem - the record companies have no obligation to make life easy for the nascent webcaster.

Re:Great :^)

What we need is a system that rips off neither the musicians nor the fans, not one that promotes illegal activity...

Well, maybe... or perhaps we need to redefine what "ripping off" means wrt "intellectual property".

I assert that the advent of cheap PCs on the the Internet changes what "natural rights" people ought to have. I believe that rights can and sometimes should change in response to changes in technology -- the Internet's great gift to humanity is that it makes data sharing as easy as speaking; that advantage outweighs the content producer's disadvantage of having to find a new business model to adapt.

Specifically, people ought to be able to copy any data they want at any time, as long as they are not benefitting commercially from that copying. As for the artists, I think systems like OpenCulture [openculture.org] or FairTunes [fairtunes.com] may be the best answer to their problems.

Re:Lets not forget

The very concept of an R&D department for a company is odd; "Let's spend money so as to make our current products and procedures obsolete, and then have to spend more money changing the equipment and retraining the employees."

But it never ceases to amaze me the gaping difference between companies like Intel and even Microsoft, whose existence practically centers around the obsolecence of their old products, and the member companies of the RIAA, who not only aren't interested in R&D but rather employ a large and expensive workforce, their lawyers, to try and maintain the technological status quo. An Anti-R&D, you might call it.

Civil Disobedience, anyone?

I'm enjoying this opportunity to get a near-first post to voice my opinion about a topic i hold very near and dear to my heart. It's right there next to my American pride, and my severe freedom-loving disorder.

I think we should not be *discouraged* by this rediculous legislation. The RIAA will continue to trampel our rights to speech and expression as long as they are able to go after every single offender of these new laws. Once we achieve a critical mass greater than their lawyers can handle, they will no longer have the ability to force this legislation onto us.

This strategy of disregard for the American Way will stand as long as there are enough sheep out there buying every product the RIAA supplies them with.

The RIAA is amazingly better than Microsoft at manipulating the public. Not only is the RIAA trampeling our rights with this legislation, but they are raising our children to appreciate tasteless music. Once the youth of America grows up with no taste or preference for music, movies, or art, they will have no cause to stand up for their rights. There will be no reason to fight for the right to broadcast the music they like simply because they will have been trained to not like any particular music. There will be no impetus for creative expression once there is no example of creative expression.

The RIAA must be boycotted on a large scale. Do not buy your children the newest pop-craze. Do not pay royaltees for what is explicitly allowed in the copyright law. Do not succumb to the legislation that seeks to revoke and repeal the rights granted to us by the framers of the constitution.

Since everyone is on the terrorist bandwagon, i'd like to point something out: legislation of this sort (including the DMCA et al) is perhaps more anti-American than any terrorist organization could ever hope to be. While the terrorists are trying to fuck up our system from the outside, corporate interest is SUCCESSFULLY fucking it up from the inside.

THE RIAA IS CAUSING MORE HARM TO THE AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE THAN ANY TERRORIST ORGANIZATION COULD EVER DREAM TO.

This all begs the question: if Osama bin Laden is so rich, why doesn't he just hire a few lobbyists. It seems to work pretty well for the RIAA, MPAA, and others.

Absurd requirements

Requirements

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)

Jeez. That's going to need new databases for radio stations.
At least I don't have to call in to ask what song they were just playing. I'll even get the UPC code and the album name and copyright owner information right there.


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

I'm sure they put on the unique user identifier in there just in case someone actually implemented all the others to comply.

Seems fair ...

And I'm sure that the labels will forward at least 0.000000000000001% of any Webcast fees to the artist. Hell, they earned it!

This is so crazy

This is outrageous. I am the manager of a non-commercial station at a High School, and we just recently began netcasting. We already pay over $3000 a year in license fees to play music on the normal airwaves. Now we have to pay even more to play the same music over the internet? I don't understand, either we have a license to play it or not...

And anyway, how is it that we have to pay large fees to promote their music? We are non-commercial, we get nothing out of it! What is going on? A long time ago, there was the whole "Payola" scandal where the record companies paid stations to play certain records. Now it's the other way around? This is insane. We will have to stop netcasting because of this, and that makes me so angry.

Just an example

My old school had a campus radio station, and about 1200 students. Last I heard, they were considering an on-campus-only webcast of the radio broadcast (since the signal was to weak to reach many parts of campus, especially the many "basement" work and rec rooms). So, assuming even 10% listenership, and the cheapest licensing schedule (for non-CPB-funded "public" stations) their fees would look something like this:

120 "listeners" * 18hr./day programming * 12 "performances"/hr. * $0.02/"performance" ==> $518.40/day.

That's right, folks, a college radio station with just over a hundred listeners could reasonably pay over $500 per day just for the privilege of putting their broadcast on the web.

Ain't (lobbyist-directed) beurocracy grand?

Technical impossibility.

And a listener's log listing: 1) The name of the service or entity

Straightforward, I guess.

2) The channel or program

Sure.

3) the date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone)

User's time zone? This would require resolution of the country that they were in, at the least (see #7 for why this is impossible), and even then it would be insufficient for large coutries, like the US, Canada or Russia...

And how do you define logging in/logging out in a inherently stateless web? Will all streaming sites require cookies/login schemes?

4) the date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone)

5) The time zone where the signal was received (user)

See above...

6) Unique User identifier

I think only MS and Real support this invasion of privacy. Does this therefore exclude other streaming formats like ogg and mp3? More money for MS and Real?

7) The country in which the user received the transmissions

Impossible to determine exactly. At best, reverse DNS lookup. But what if your reverse DNS resolves not to a country, but a gTLD? Do they expect a lookup of WHOIS data (usually inaccurate) to find out the country of a IP address?

In short, I see no way of getting most data the data without massive invasions of privacy and fundamental changes to software and Internet standards...

Re:How can we stop this?

D'oh! I found it -- it was right at the top.

I loved this little requirement, though:

"ADDRESSES: An original and ten copies of any comment shall be delivered to: Office of the General Counsel, Copyright Office, James Madison Building, Room LM-403, First and Independence Avenue, SE, Washington, DC; or mailed to: Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), P.O. Box 70977, Southwest Station, Washington, DC 20024-0977.

Whatever happened to triplicate?

Good Riddance, radio free rant.

Fine. Let the RIAA price their crap right off of the web. The last thing I want competing with pictures of my three month old daughter is a no save copy of a Lars drum lick. This will, hopefully, leave the big five music publishers further in the past and encourage more people to sign with independent studios and publishers like MP3.com sought to be. Let them rule their litle airwave monopolies, let their listnership decline to zero and let them all perish, but keep that shit off the web.

The buggy-whip makers are in charge of the auto in

It's happened: The buggy-whip makers have been put in charge of the auto industry. Piece by piece, at the bequest of the old-guard publishing industries, our courts and legislators are killing the Internet and the promise it held.

Since 9/11, so many people have been quoting George Orwell's 1984. So for this circumstance, I'll have to choose a different quote from the same work, and adapt it:

"If there is hope, it must come from South America and India". (Substitute for Orwell's proles)

Say goodbye to college webcasts..

This hits the college stations and non-profits the hardest. Where dwindling budgets and volunteer help is the norm, many will just say that's it and pull the plug....One college station I'm familiar with has an annual budget of $30,000 dollars, total. They struggle everyday just to get by, and saw the internet as a way they could save money over maintaining expensive transmitters.

Letter I sent my station on campus

disclaimer: i edited the letter a bit for length. yes, i am a dj at the station. no, i'm not pimping us in any way ;-)

So the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel released their recommendations for how radio stations should pay if they stream over the internet. the actual release is here (http://www.loc.gov/copyright/fedreg/2002/67fr5761 .pdf). Of course, it's a tough read, so I'll sum it up for you guys, and provide relevant links at the bottom. These rules are *proposed*, and haven't gone into effect yet.

+per performance means "per song / per listener". That means every time one person hears one song, that's a performance. If 12 people listen to a webcast of 12 songs, that's 144 performances.

+epheremal recording means a backup copy of the same song to be used for streaming.

So according to these rules for webcasting, KBVR is a non-commercial broadcaster. We must pay $0.02 for every "performance". 9% of those performance fees will be added on as cost for an epheremal license fee.

So yeah....doesn't sound too bad, does it? Just wait...

Let's do a little math here. I'm assuming that 2.5% of the roughly 20,000 OSU students would listen to KBVR streaming over the internet. I don't even know the real number, so I'm just going to (hopefully) guess low. If any of you could give me better numbers, feel free.

500 listeners x 24 hours/day x 10 "performances" an hour x $0.02 per "performance" ===> $2400 A DAY. That comes out to roughly $875,000 A YEAR if we could webcast under the new rules.

For *each song* webcasted, KBVR would have to report the following information to the primary copyright holders (usually the record label, or to the individual band if you're cool like metallica and dr. dre):

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)

That's for EACH SONG WEBCASTED.

On top of that, we will have to provide the following information for *EVERY PERSON* who would listen to us over the internet:

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

These new proposed rules are pretty damn stupid. That's all I'm going to say.

Thanks for your time...

~steve

So let me make sure I understand this, RIAA/gov:

I pay you and my ISP exorbitant amounts of money (for licensing and bandwidth, respectively) so that I'm given the privilege of publicizing your artists.

Not to mention, the "license to license" alone costs $500 yearly. The RIAA is manipulating our government so that they can prevent the general population from innovating, broadcasting, or even listening to stations not influenced by them. An example of these unfair regulations restricting the masses is a project of mine called laconica [sic] (it will soon have a web page further detailing it here [initialized.org]; initialized.org's development is behind schedule). Conceptually, it allows the listeners to control the stream by vote, comment on the music, create their own playlists (if the playlist is voted high enough, it begins streaming the next hour), and even upload their own music.

Considering the fact that initialized is not for profit and we'd still pay for bandwidth by the gigabyte *after* the RIAA fees, our own laconica stream will most likely fail to become a reality. (We still plan to continue developing and release the software as open source, though.)