Rockbites: Radio stations pulling Internet plug, others fighting back

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September 2002 • Rockbites Alternative Daily

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Radio stations pulling Internet plug, others fighting back
14 September 2002

This past July the US major-label recording industry, through their legal and political arm the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), succeeded in convincing the US government to support two requests: that they be allowed to demand per-play, per-listener royalties for Internet streaming of copyrighted music, and to demand that all streaming stations provide detailed data on which songs they have played.
    The ax doesn’t officially fall until next month—fees come due on the 20th of October—but more than 60 educational and community radio stations in the US have already halted their Internet streams.
    The RIAA’s new royalty structure, based on the stunningly dubious Digital Millennium Copyright Act (among other things, it assumes Internet streams are 'perfect copies' of CDs), operates retroactively back to 1998, when president Clinton signed the DMCA into law. Radio stations will owe for all songs they’ve streamed over the Internet since then. Those who can’t afford it, or who can’t afford the legal fees to fight it, are simply pulling the plug.
    Earlier this year, Mona Lewandoski, the president of Harvard University’s WHRB-FM radio station, wrote the US Copyright Office, stating “If the proposed rules were to be made final without change, WHRB would have to cease Webcasting immediately... To comply with the regulation, the station would need to install an automated commercial software-and-hardware system to track streamed music, at a cost of $70,000 to $100,000, and generate a comprehensive database for its entire library of 750,000 songs.”
    “To create such a database would require the volunteers who run the station to enter by hand data on 750,000 songs, as well as 1,000 new songs acquired each week. And to complete the process, the station would need to spend $25,000 to $50,000 on computer terminals and customized database software,” Lewandoski stated.
    “The station believes it will take approximately 10 years, given the current level of volunteer human resources, to have 70 percent of its collection cataloged.”
    For those sentimental about the Internet’s promise of equal access and freedom from corporate control, there’s a silver lining to this story, thanks to a spirit of independence and a groundswell of anti-corporate cooperation now thriving outside the grasp of the government/RIAA. Independent radio stations, including New Jersey’s WFMU-FM, are seeking and receiving written permission from independent record labels, and from individual artists, to stream their catalogs royalty-free—completely circumventing the DMCA and the new royalty rules.
    Meanwhile, other activists are coming up with ways and means to fight the RIAA Goliath. A Rice University employee has set up an informational Web site on the impending royalty deadline, called Save Our Streams. The site includes a Web-based fax system that will send form-letter faxes to all your legislators based on your zip code. A grassroots group called Voice Of Webcasters has also set up a fax page in support of the new Internet Radio Fairness Act, HR 5285. | Save Our Streams | | royalty info from WFMU | | DMCA overview | | Voice Of Webcasters | | Internet Radio Fairness Act (PDF) | | DMCA info from Electronic Frontier Foundation | | US Webcasting rates | | top of page |

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