Small Webcasters get Powerful New Ally 362
An anonymous reader writes "On, Sunday, October 20, 2002, the RIAA's subsidiary, SoundExchange, was set to introduce draconian new fees on small internet webcasters - fees that were designed to drive those webcasters out of business and preserve the RIAA's monopoly on the distribution of music in North America. One of those small webcasters is the Triangle's classical music station, WCPE - quite possibly the finest classical music station in the world. Now it turns out that WCPE has an 800 lb gorilla in their corner, and he's set his sights on the RIAA."
In case it gets slashdotted (Score:-1, Informative)
Fri Oct 18, 8:02 PM ET
By Peter Kaplan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A senior Republican senator has held up passage of a bill that would have lowered the royalty fees that small Webcasters pay to stream music over the Internet.
Only days before Webcasters are due to begin making royalty payments, Sen. Jesse Helms, a North Carolina Republican, on Thursday night blocked legislation designed to ease the financial impact on small Webcasters.
The bill already had support of industry players and approval of the House of Representatives. But an aide to Helms said Webcasters in North Carolina complained that the terms were still too onerous.
"The small Webcasters that we heard form in North Carolina did not feel like they had been part of discussions," said Joe Lanier, Helms's aide. "They were concerned that even under this bill they would not be able to survive."
With the legislation on hold, Webcasters will have to start making the higher, retroactive royalty payments by Oct. 20 to musicians and record labels.
But late on Friday, small Webcasters got a temporary break from the higher fees from SoundExchange, a division of the Recording Industry Association of America (news - web sites) that collects royalties for recording copyright owners.
Eligible small Webcasters can avoid a per-performance fee and instead may pay a $500 annual fee, starting Oct. 21, for each year or part of a year they have been in operation since 1998, SoundExchange said in a statement.
That arrangement will stand until Congress acts on the pending legislation, SoundExchange said.
Among the objectors to the bill were two prominent religious broadcasters and a classical music station, Lanier said. They told Helms that the long-term precedent that would be set by the agreement was worse than having to pay higher royalty rates in the short term, Lanier said.
The Senate recessed on Thursday night and is not scheduled to reconvene until Nov. 12.
Helms was hoping to get the two sides to negotiate better terms for Webcasters by the time the Senate returns, Lanier said.
"We certainly hope that some sort of fair arrangement can be worked out," Lanier said.
The legislation would have allowed small operators to pay a percentage of their revenues or expenses, rather than a flat per-song royalty rate set by the Library of Congress (news - web sites) in June.
Smaller Webcasters had protested that the flat rate of
But the hold-up provoked a terse reaction from one of the bill's key backers, Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat.
"I share the disappointment of Webcasters and many content providers that an anonymous hold prevented the Senate from passing this bill before the Oct. 20 deadline," Leahy said in a statement.
Leahy said the royalty issue had become "difficult in the extreme," but he urged both sides to continue negotiating.
The industry-brokered deal had won approval from the House of Representatives last week.
Under the terms of the deal, small Webcasters would pay a percentage of their revenues for broadcasts between 1998 and the end of 2002, increasing to 10 percent over the next two years, or 12 percent if the station's revenues exceeded $250,000.
Alternatively, Webcasters would pay 5 percent of their expenses for the 1998-2002 period and 7 percent over the next two years, if that amount was greater.
The deal only applies to Webcasters who will have taken in less than $1 million in total from 1998 until the end of this year. The revenue cap increases to $500,000 in 2003 and $1.25 million in 2004.
Larger Webcasters, such as America Online and Clear Channel Communications were not included in the agreement and will pay the previously set rate starting on Oct. 20.
Why or Why not (Score:3, Informative)
Read the article. Darrr... (Score:5, Informative)
For crying out loud (Score:3, Informative)
The last time someone managed to make a network of hacked computers big enough that they could DDOS yahoo to a crawl, it made the national news. Slashdot isn't going to come near to that.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
It snuck through the house before people realized it had changed. So blocking it in the Senate actually was acting on the side of the small webcasters.
Check out the previous news on the subject for more details.
Re:Okay, I give up... (Score:4, Informative)
It's the cities of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill, and the Research Triangle Park, which is the home of RedHat
Jesse Helms to the rescue! (Score:3, Informative)
I'd call Senator Jesse Helms [senate.gov] at least a 2 ton gorilla myself.... ;>
It is nice to see that Jesse Helms isn't taking a vacation in his last few months in office. (He's a short-timer -- he retires at teh end of the year.)
another fucking moron (Score:1, Informative)
his term expires in january, he is not soliciting any contributions
Re:Read the article. Darrr... (Score:5, Informative)
You are right that the RIAA should be paying the webcasters, just as they do with the regular radio station promoters (that's a whole other problem, though).
Re:Double WOW (Score:1, Informative)
I didn't think he was an 800lb gorilla so I went to google to find an image of him. I found some [google.com], but when I went to the first site [brassknuckles.net] it was taken down by "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy".
I guess he is an 800 lb gorilla.
Do the math (Score:5, Informative)
lets say a station reaches 100 people on average and at 4 minutes per track averages 15 songs an hour. that's 360 songs a day, or 131,400 a year... at the other rate of 7 cents per 100 listeners it works out to a fee of $9,198 a year. to someone like this a flat rate of $500 seems like a pretty huge difference... heck this flat rate would come to almost half as much even if you only averaged 10 listeners (500 vs 918).
too bad the flat rate is only good till congress acts on the pending legislation, because this deal would probably actually be fairly viable for quite a few webcasters
Re: "Dammit, how'd we miss this guy?" (Score:3, Informative)
Helms is not running for reelection (Score:5, Informative)
er, no.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wow (Score:3, Informative)
The Republicans are generally not friends with Holleywood and the music industry. The Democrats are traditionally those industries' allies. So while it's just a -tad- bit surprising, it shouldn't come as a complete shock. I never thought I'd see the day though when Jesse Helms would actually fight on the right side of an issue and be anything other than an embarassment of a senator.
Re:Somebody please explain (Score:3, Informative)
IANAWYNTBTKTFS (I am not a whatever you need to be to know this for sure), but I think you're always free to do this as an independent, or even through your label. The issue here is the mandatory licensing terms which allow broadcasters (and webcasters) to play songs without explicit permission as long as they pay the royalty fees set out in the law. Otherwise, stations would have to negiotiate individually with each and every copyright holder in order to buy permission to play songs. Now I might be somewhat wrong in that stations may need to pay the RIAA no matter what (even if they only play independent music) just because it was the easiest way to set this up in the olden days.
Similar mechanisms have been proposed to allow anyone to manufacture life saving drugs or use old software patents as long as they pay a set royalty rate. The rates would presumably be higher than what you might be able to get if you negiotiated your own terms and higher than what the original company would normally charge.
Re:er, no.... (Score:2, Informative)
This bill was blocked because, in the long run, fees would be HIGHER.
"Among the objectors to the bill were two prominent religious broadcasters and a classical music station, Lanier said. They told Helms that the long-term precedent that would be set by the agreement was worse than having to pay higher royalty rates in the short term, Lanier said. "
Someone did the math above, and it's almost 10x more per year using the "lowered" plan on average.
Whatever people think about Jesse... (Score:2, Informative)
I only hope that the senator who replaces him will be so responsive, and not just pretend to be from North Carolina...
Re:Okay, I give up... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about your own content? (Score:3, Informative)
No. Why would it? If you create the content, you are the copyright holder. It would apply to your friend's garage band music only if your friend's garage band is represented by RIAA or ASCAP or similar. Likewise, the fees don't apply to any sound recordings in the public domain, provided the songs recorded are also in the public domain.
MichaelThen don't pay (Score:3, Informative)
I have a stream that plays a three hour loop of the Best of my radio show, so I own the copyright on that and it's all that's on the stream... Why should I pay the RIAA for this?
You shouldn't. What makes you think you should?
Re:Do people really think $500/yr is onerous? (Score:3, Informative)
The blocked bill which did pass in the House underwent some very radical last minute changes due to negotiations with a small group of webcasters and the RIAA. A bit more info about what actually happened here
Re:What a genuinely interesting dilemma. (Score:3, Informative)
Nah, that's the "ironic pseduo-post-modern world."
The real world has quite its share of things that are simple and black/white good/evil. They're just not EVERYTHING, and everything has good parts and evil parts.
Cases in point: Hitler & The "Tarot Card Sniper" opposed to Mother Theresa or the United Way. (Heck, the UW is a great example--they're a good thing with bad people at some of their hearts.)
"Those who call the world a thousand shades of grey forget about black and white far too often."
Re:What a genuinely interesting dilemma. (Score:3, Informative)
United Way: In 1995, former United Way President William Aramony was convicted for conspiracy, fraud, and tax crimes related to his stealing from the United Way. See, e.g. this site [uwcact.org]. Great use of your charity dollars, right? Or a precursor to our corporate accounting scandals of today?
Now I'm not saying that this is the definitive story on your examples. But is it black and white?
Re:classical music? (Score:2, Informative)
Remember folks, we're not talking about the composers. We're talking about who owns the sound recordings, made by the conductor and the musicians who played on that recording.
Classical music is not an RIAA alternative, unless you are buying some of those Costco CDs released by eastern eurpoean orchestras (which are also copyrighted).
Re:What a genuinely interesting dilemma. (Score:2, Informative)
Then she has certainly found a loophole in the Big Law, the one that says that you cannot take it with you. She died in 1997.
Re:Do people really think $500/yr is onerous? (Score:2, Informative)
Good point, but let's take a look at a small station's total yearly costs. SomaFM actually breaks this down for you on their donations page.
Here is a breakdown of our costs:
Monthly Internet connectivity between the studio and the servers - $850/month (although we need to increase this to handle the additional channels, we're maxing out our bandwidth now)
T1s to the studio, server colocation, internet fees - $1500-2000 a month
Software and hardware coss - $600 a month (It costs about $800-900 in hardware and software for each new channel we add)
Rent: $0
Salaries: $0
ASCAP and BMI fees - $700 a year and rising (the more listeners we have the more we have to pay)
SomaFM DJs spend hundreds of dollars a month out of their own pockets on new music for the station.
Other things SomaFM needs:
Bandwidth! - We can always use more bandwidth. If you are an ISP or Web Host with a minimum of a T3 fractional connection and can commit to giving SomaFM 2-5mb/sec of bandwidth, and have a machine that can run the Shoutcast server software (Linux, BSD, Solaris versions are available) then you have what it takes. (The CPU load added by shoutcast is negligible). Contact Rusty Hodge for the details
Noncommercial station too... while $500/year donation from generous listeners like you (ok, I've been listening to NPR go through it's beg cycle) is nothing to sneeze at, it's hardly the whole picture.
And in related news.... (Score:2, Informative)