Small Webcasters Sue RIAA 315
killthiskid writes "The Webcaster Alliance, a small group of 198 webcasters has sued the RIAA. CNET has the news, along with a growing number of other sites (google news). As many /.'ers know, in 2002 the Library of Congress decided on .07 cents per song (retroactive to '98). After that another bill was passed to protect smaller webcasters. Aparently, many webcasters are still not happy." Their complaint is online.
No Chance (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me for asking, but (Score:5, Insightful)
They were trying to pudsh them offline. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yah, that's gonna happen (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait, wait, wait... (Score:2, Insightful)
maybe i'm missing something about the rate (Score:3, Insightful)
one month is 720 hours, times 60 minutes, divided by 4 minutes/song, is about 10,000 songs a month. multiply this through, and thats about $7 a month to operate an internet radio station.
surely without multicast, the bandwith alone costs much more than this?
Quick note for those who don't read the articles.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The RIAA, as an organization, managed to move themselves into a position where they are the sole entity authorized to collect and distribute the performance fees for music streaming. I am not aware of any group or comitee that oversees the RIAA in this activity, and being well aware of the unethical-when-they-can-get-away-with-it actions of their members, I think that it would not surprise anyone if the RIAA decided that smaller non-member music companies and performers were completely ignored when it comes time to pay out the fees RIAA colected on their behalf.
Good for them (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:maybe i'm missing something about the rate (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe I'm not seeing something here but.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If said web broadcasters really do object, the best way to hurt the RIAA is by not using their music.-There are plenty of bands out their on the web whose music could likely be picked up relatively cheaply, and denying the RIAA future profits.
Remember Anti-Trust (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, the complaint as written is based on the Sherman anti-trust act, and in my opinion holds some water. The RIAA does control the vast majority of sound recordings in the US. They are acting in a manner to eliminate competition and maintain that monopoly. They are not doing this by producing a better product, or offering it at a cheaper price, but by clubbing smaller entities with "intellictual property" laws and forcing common aggreements on everyone.
In sum:
1. The RIAA is looks a monopoly.
2. The RIAA acts like a monopoly.
3. The RIAA acts against smaller firms to maintain the monopoly. (Prevent compeititors from entering the market.)
That sounds to me like enough of an argument for Sherman Anti-Trust to be applied.
If you RTA you'll see that the webcasters don't want to get the music for free, but just for a price they can afford... Which is a good argument when RIAA acutally pays radio to do exactly what the webcasters do.
Whether they succeed or not... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh shock and horror (Score:5, Insightful)
How about Bassdrive.com? They play noting but drum & bass. Not one single true electronic artist is signed to a major label that is represented by a major body, including the RIAA. Every one of their artists happy to get air time on a popular network, and those who get played and ask for money get it. Why should they have to pay the RIAA?
Everyone has to pay the RIAA because their lobbyists got a law passed that assumes ALL music is represented by the RIAA and that they have final say over who gets compensated, not the artist. What happens to the money when the RIAA can't find the rightful artist (most likely an independent)? Who gets it then?
Re:Michael (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yah, that's gonna happen (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh shock and horror (Score:2, Insightful)
If this is truly the case then people should be [and probably are] contesting the validity of the law. Almost like levies on CD-Rs in canada. Personally I use CD-Rs for two purposes. Backups and pirating software. The levies go to music industry types though... what about software industries?
Tom
Re:Excuse me for asking, but (Score:2, Insightful)
Alright, but if I'm a small webcaster trying to promote free speech the entire burden is upon me and the people who want to be freely heard -- not upon those who want un-free speech. Since free speech generally doesn't have any money, Free speech is being priced out of the market in favor of people who can pay to do the copyright searches.
Intellectual property vs The Big Web Grab (Score:5, Insightful)
There is an alarming trend for the opensource community to appear to outsiders as very cavalier with issues dealing with protecting rights for others to derive profit from their works. Perhaps the mindset is "I gave all my code away for free, why should I care if you make money from your game/music/movie/software/patent/intellectual property/licensed image/registered trademark ?".
Do "opensourcers" belive that if something is not covered by a GPL-like license that it's okay to ignore that license, just because they're not afraid of being caught?
I'm all for patent reform and whatnot, but... until laws are changed, those laws still exist. Do I think that the RIAA and MPAA are locked in a downward spiral and that they're getting ready to pull a 'SCO'? Sure I do. With a world full of indedpendent artists and movie makers and the internet as a distribution method, It's completely conceivable that we could have "GPL" bands and movie studios releasing GOOD STUFF onto P2P network. Hey opensource/free software community: In a band? Have a video camera?
Ever wonder why department stores play MUZAK? It's because they PAY a company for the rights to play that MUZAK in their store, and MUZAK is cheaper than real music. If we really care so much, isn't it our responsibility to provide an alternative?
If you own a bar and play a radio with hip-hop tunes on it, do you know that you should be paying royalties to the artists? Do you know that if you run a restaurant and you show a movie in your restaurant that you are supposed to pay royalties?
Do you know that you're not allowed to have a picture of Bart Simpson on your website? Do you know that your favorite movie sound clips may not be 'fair use'?
Just because the internet has made it easy to share content, doesn't mean it's right or legal. Try to picture it from the viewpoint of Linux vs. Commerical OSes - if you don't want to support MPAA and RIAA, then *WE* need to provide an alternative, otherwise we need to play by their rules or petition to have the rules changed.
Be professional (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait, wait, wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
With 50,000 people listening to the same MusicMatch radio song, that's suddenly a LOT of money.
To make it even worse, what happens when a user doesn't like a song and switches channels? Pay twice! A radio station doesn't have to pay extra if a user skips to a different channel. But for internet radio, there's a payment for the song you listened to before, and the one you're listening to now.
What's apparent here is GREED -- RIAA isn't content with getting a similar amount as they do from broadcast radio stations, but want additional levy "because they can". The justice system in this country, headed by the Senate and Congress, is more corrupt than any banana republic official, and will gladly give big business whatever they want, as long as they get their support in return.
Don't expect any fairness here. The only concern is how much can small businesses be bled without dying.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Maybe I'm not seeing something here but.. (Score:3, Insightful)
With Radio there are huge barriers to entry. With netcasters there isn't, so you can see a proliferation of independant-minded netcasters who play what they want, and aren't necessarily interested in taking money from so-called "indies", in exchange for getting certain songs played.
So the industry can't control what they play, so the danger is they could gain significant audience and start creating major stars on their own without the industry (gasp!). This would be the end for the music industry as we know it since artists will no longer have to sign their life away to the industry fatcats to become stars.
Obviously royalties are due, but they are deliberatly set unfairly (on a per audience member basis) compared to broadcast radio, to put most of the netcasters out of business,
Re:Better world through litigation (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too much money.. (Score:3, Insightful)
You just made a very good point...there aren't any "good alternatives". Even the unknown musicians I listen to are signed to big labels like Sony and Atlantic. You know why most "good" artists don't sign with independent labels or get played on independent radio stations? Because indies don't have the huge corporate marketing engine behind them to make their artists world famous and filthy rich! Once an artist wants to make money off their work, the work is no longer about the art, it is about business. Making a record is not about creating a work of art, it is about a bunch of zeros on your paycheck, having five different beach houses, 10 luxury cars in the driveway, and having your mug all over TV and magazines. The most reliable way to get that is to go with a big label and the RIAA. It's sad, but true. If you believe anything else, you're fooling yourself.
What the article DOESN'T say (Score:5, Insightful)
This is not about the actual rate per song, although it is certainly an issue, as much as it is about the fact that the people who are forced to pay this rate are not given a chance to take part in the negotiations. This is in part to the prohibitive cost to enter into the negotiations, as anyone who wants to participate in the CARP hearings must bear the cost of the hearing itself, which consistently runs into more than a million dollars per hearing. The cost of the hearings is not determined until it is finished, and is calculated at the rate of $200 per hour for each of the lawyers on the panel.
The real issue is that the RIAA pre-negotiates with the major players, leaving them as the sole representative of, oh, everyone in control of the current music cartel. This means that they are colluding their copyright power to exclude others from negotiating.
In the Napster case, the federal judge found that the RIAA was a monopoly and was using collusion in a refusal to negotiate, which was the basis for David Boise's counter-suit and a blatant violation of the antitrust laws. In Napster, the judge decided that since Napster was "bad" first, the RIAA got away with it.
The webcasters consistently get told by the RIAA that they are playing too much independent music, in a manner that legally amounts to threats and bullying. Many webcasters have dropped major label music altogether.
The other issue is that the RIAA, through SoundExchange, which is basically an RIAA subsidiary, collects all the money for royalties. Since the independent artists are not part of the RIAA, we will never get paid our portion of rightfully earned royalties.
Additionally, the FTC has found the RIAA in violation of the antitrust laws several times in the past 12 months alone -- price-fixing seems to be the greatest consistently violated provision but one seldom spoken of violation was using the record clubs to avoid paying royalties to authors. Each time they get caught, they settle out of court, try to kick it under the rug and continue on their merry way.
The RIAA completely controls radio, the media, and is now trying exert its monopoly over the Internet. In the case of the Internet, the real problem is that the indies can use it, too.
Considering that the music industry sends out in excess of $4 billion annually in free physical goods (average over the past five years), you'd think that they would embrace the free promotional tool available. The problem for them is that the independents have access to it, too.
The entire idea behind calling downloaders pirates and making the false assertion that downloading copyrighted material is theft is to intentionally exclude the tens of thousands of us who WANT people to download and listen to our music.
It's not about those fractions of a penny per song. It's about the fact that less than 10 percent of the recorded music controls more than 90 percent of the market. The rest of us aren't allowed in.
We can reach a global audience without the record labels right now. That's why the RIAA is fighting so hard to criminalize P2P. Because then they own the entire market for recorded music and the only way to reach the public will be through a major label contract -- again.
Antitrust is the ONLY way to stop the RIAA.
Re:Quick note for those who don't read the article (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing I don't understand, though, is why the RIAA necessarily feels its a good thing to form the webcasting industry into a more professional, tightly-knit one. Wouldn't they benefit from a stronger bargaining position when dealing with small independent webcasters who have little leverage and are a dime a dozen?
The only thing I can think of immediately is that the RIAA feels those small guys don't bother always to pay royalties anyway, perhaps.
Re:Intellectual property vs The Big Web Grab (Score:3, Insightful)
The shift I'm talking about though is that digital information has essentially become trivial to copy. Combined with the fact that almost everything can be moved into and out of this medium, we stuck at a crossroads:
We can retrofit implement a check & balance system to impose consequences on "wrong" behavior. This is the DMCA stick with the RIAA's spyglass on you. The "punish the few harshly" is a takeoff from the old IRS theme of making audits their own punishment. Avoid the punishment meant avoiding the audit. So, people pay their taxes. However, the deductions fall into the "calculated risk" category for most people. The devil will be that this system always has a little abuse to play with.
Today, we have private trading outside of P2P, which will grow. Remember the swap meets at the old computer shows. I would trade C64 games back and forth until everyone there was saturated with the same library. Didn't take long. This happens now in any technically-savvy gathering for music. So fighting P2P is useless.
OR
We can rebuild the model to take advantage of the new system. Getting specific, content creators need to be paid based how popular their creation is. For investment, distribution (even digitally), storage, catelogging and other meta-activities, an umbrella company would form somehow. It would also look out for its own income channels, but accepting the nature of the new system. So something akin to the RIAA will always need to exist.
However, it can think long and hard about what's going on and collaborate on a exploiting the new technology. Let's start with some axioms:
Once on the internet, information is free for personal use. It cannot be resold commercially, but distributed for free with no limits. Take it or leave it, this is the truth today
Creators need to make a living wage and it should roughly scale to the "popularity" of their output. Popularity would be hard to measure everywhere, but metrics need to be formed somehow
The only solution I can think of is that a top-down tax be formed that imposes a bandwidth-style fee on all ISPs. Then this escrow pool builds. By sampling certain channels - and this would be technically challenging, a weighed listed it built of who's content is moved most. Then the pool is paid to the creators based on these ratios. Determining the true content, true movement seems very hard to get right, I think.
However, all types of digital information could be passed through these scanners.. Not unlike the FBI own snooper idea, with much of the same privacy problems. Sampling need not be at 100% and could spend some time checking unknown patterns against a growing database of known encryption schemes for content. It wouldn't need to be real time, just fast enough to make some sort of rolyalty pay period effect.
This idea may not work, but it's the only one I can think of. Others?
mug
How'd they do that? (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? How in the world did they get away with making a law retroactive? I could have sworn that was prohibited in the constitution, something about ex post facto laws...
Re:Yah, that's gonna happen (Score:4, Insightful)
Copyright is the control of the license to copy. Period.
It is not, not not NOT ownership of songs. No one owns a song. Songs do not exist in physical space. You cannot own them anymore than you can own a dream.
A song, like a dream, really exists in the mind. Attempts to own patterns in the mind are obscene.
Jefferson and the others were correct. Ideas are the property of all -- with the caveat that the originator may license copies of a idea, for a LIMITED period of time, to encourage creative people. But they never intended products of the mind to be PROPERTY.
And: the law of copyright was a compromise. Limited time, then release it to the public. The IP "owners" now have broken their side of the bargain by effectively eliminating an expiration date, thanks to the idiotically literal Supreme Court justices.
They broke their side of a two hundred+ year old bargain. They want to turn all the works of man after 1920 or so into their private property, to be bought, sold, and hoarded, forever. As far as I am concerned, the contract is void between the public and the record, movie, and book publishers, and they were the ones who voided it with their own greed and memetic manipulation. They sowed the wind. Let them reap the whirlwind.
Satellite Radio and Digital Cable (Score:4, Insightful)
Now, where does that leave satellite radio and the digital cable providers like Time Warner who have dedicated music channels in their offerings? By the same line of reasoning, are not both of these distribution methods liable for the same goofy "one listener, one copy" line of reasoning the RIAA has managed to foist onto webcasters? If not, why? The digital reciever in your dashboard or the cable box has to copy the content just like your computer does when listening to a webcast. What about DTV stations that run concerts? If being a digital broadcast is what has the RIAA's panties in a wad re: webcasters, it seems horribly unfair to level ridiculous fees on them, but not the other digital broadcasters.
Apples and Oranges (Score:3, Insightful)
So -- I am paying an average of $50 bucks a month to stream less than AM quality music to at the most 20 simultanious users.....Yet at the very least they want me to pay $2500 minimum yearly plus about $7 per listener per month to do this.
That is ludicrus. That is awful. What do I owe if I invite 25 friends to a party at my house put 50 CD's I have purchased in a CD changer, hit shuffle and then play in the background as my party goes on for 4 hours? That is more akin to what a webbrodcast is -- than comparing it to a real life FOR PROFIT radio company that has the advanatge of a small dial that can only fit 15 or so channels in a band between 87+ to 108.0 and lots of bored people driving their cars home from work.
Look at shoutcast -- you have almost 4000 servers competing for 30,000 users. Each server has anywhere between 5 and 500 slots. Their is no commercial radio station that could make payroll for 1 week with those kind of demographics.
Re:Ween (Score:3, Insightful)
Built in regulation (Score:3, Insightful)
Calculations Complete For 1000 listeners at 128 kbps Calculations @ 1 Month Kilobits = 364,953,600,000 Kilobytes = 45,619,200,000 Megabits = 348,046,875 Megabytes = 43,505,859 Gigabits = 324,144 Gigabytes = 40,518
Even having the possibility to have 100 users at a time would run you about 4,052 GB per month. I think the price of bandwidth alone should be enough to regulate the threat for the RIAA.
Re:They were trying to pudsh them offline. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it started out the other way around... Originally, the labels didn't want radio stations to play their songs, b/c they wanted to sell albums instead, and they thought it was a bad idea for the songs to be heard "for free". (Sound familiar, anyone?) Eventually the stations took the labels to court and got what is called "mandatory licensing" - meaning that the labels *must* allow the stations to play their music for a set price. And once the labels got used to the idea that the radio stations were *good* for sales instead of bad, the radio stations started requiring the labels to pay *them* for playing the songs (and this far outweighed what the radio stations were forced to pay the labels by the law). This is called payola, and the gov't outlawed it.
What these webcasters are suing for is not *what* the RIAA was doing, but *how* they were doing it. A U.S. senator forced the webcasters to make a deal with the RIAA, threatening to have his own staff write the agreement instead (which of course would have been disastrous) if they didn't. So a small subsection of webcasters went and made the deal with the RIAA. The problem is that webcasters right now are required to pay 2-4 times as much as a radio station for the same songs! This means death for many small webcasters who can't hope to pay the full amount - even the radio payments can be oppressive to a small radio station sometimes.
So there is a difference between *legal* and *right*. And in this case, there is sufficient evidence that the RIAA was using their political clout to artificially impede competition and market forces that they may have actually run afoul of antitrust laws. (Heck, the major members of the RIAA have already been convicted of price fixing by the DOJ!)
So now it is up to the courts to decide whether or not what they have been doing is, in fact, legal.
Re:The Answer (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm asking the question in general, although webcasting presents an interesting variation on my problem. If someone puts out a piece of music (or whatever) how am I supposed to tell if they are expecting some sort of recompense, or if they are doing it in order to speak to me without regard to compensation?
Let's say that I go to a P2P network and download, for example, descramble.mp3. How am I to know whether the person who recorded descramble wanted to retain copyright control or wanted to reach me with a political message? (The descramble.mp3 I am talking about is by Joesph Wecker, and it is him singing DeCSS.) The same question fits in the case of webcasters. Ought a webcaster be expected to pay the RIAA if it plays descramble? How is this to be determined? What if Joesph simply refuses to discuss the matter and won't tell us whether he wants to protect his copyright or wants to express his political opinion?
Re:Wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Feel free to read the DMCA and the webcasting related settlements if you don't believe me. Here's a link with some people who run stations talking about this:
http://lists.microshaft.org/pipermail/dmca_discus
Wrong AGAIN (Score:3, Insightful)
You can say it a thousand fucking times, you can mod this into oblivion - the fact remains this is utterly WRONG. Online broadcasters are supposed to keep logs of all media served so they can account to the "BIG FIVE." Well, guess what? If you're doing your fucking job as is required in the first place (ie keeping those logs) and you really are NOT playing any of their works, then you have all the proof you need to disprove any assertions made by these clowns when they come knocking. And if they press the matter, under that same piece of law you have legal recourse not only in civil court, but the FTC will also likely be interested in hearing from you.
I want to see every webcaster get agreements in writing from 2000 indie labels.
Not terribly hard. A webform with a nicely labeled "submit" button is all it takes. All I hear from you is the same I hear from these "indies:" whining and deception.