Internet Radio May Stream North to Canada

An anonymous reader writes "With U.S. copyright royalties threatening to kill Internet radio in the U.S., Michael Geist explains why webcasters considering a move to Canada will find that the legal framework for Internet radio trades costs for complexity. There are two main areas of concern from a Canadian perspective — broadcast regulation and copyright fees. The broadcast side is surprisingly regulation-free, but there are at least three Canadian copyright collectives lining up to collect from Internet radio stations."

Canada? Why not anywhere else in the world?

[vertinox]

One of my favorite internet stations is Industrial/Techno http://ebm-radio.de/ [ebm-radio.de] and is hosted out of Germany. I would suspect they have little RIAA music as it is, but couldn't you just find a hosting company in another nation? Sweeden perhaps?

How about a DMCA abuse station?

[Anonymous Coward]

DMCA has safe-harbor provisions, right? So why not let people upload songs, queue them, and then randomly stream the queue? Technically, wouldn't the RIAA have to file complaints against each file?

Re:Canada? Why not anywhere else in the world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting a minimum 128K uplink with QOS across the pond for signal relay is not for the faint of heart, or the non-commercial of budget. This is why Canada is a much preferrable option for many US-based webcasters.

At the risk of repeating what may have been said already:
http://www.saveourinternetradio.com/ [saveourinternetradio.com] - Bless you, Radio Paradise for leading the charge!

I'd bless NPR for fighting this as well, but the fact is that NPR's opposition to third-channel adjacency rules in the Low-Power FM legal tussles of 1998-2000 helped prevent the FCC from granting 90% of the possible LPFM frequencies across the US, and therefore they have forced many (including my own) non-commercial and community radio stations onto the internet.

Already did that

[TwistedTR]

About 3 years ago the shoutcast stream i'm affiliated with ETN.FM moved everything up to Canada, and got ourselves declared as a not for profit organization. Since this is just a hobby and no one is making cash from it, it afforded us a greater ammount of legal protection than we could ever hope to receive inside the US. There was some problems gaining the non-profit status, but it wasn't too difficult.

Stop the madness!

[i_like_spam]

Moving to Canada, an offshore rig or Timbuktu is not a solution.

Let's stop this madness.

Write your Congressional representative. [ipetitions.com]
Save the Streams. [savethestreams.org]

Re:How about a DMCA abuse station?

[Anonymous Coward]

> DMCA has safe-harbor provisions, right? So why not let people upload songs, queue them, and then randomly stream the queue? Technically, wouldn't the RIAA have to file complaints against each file?

We could call it "YouPod". And Google could buy it for a billion dollars. And dollar-for-dollar, lawyer-for-lawyer, the YouTube DMCA lawsuit is a fair fight.

The problem is that after Google wins the YouTube/DMCA battle, the MAFIAA will simply buy a new law, DMCA2, on the grounds that the DMCA is obsolete.

They've actually got some factual ground there -- back in the pre-DMCA era, when hosting content cost a small fortune (why, you needed actual server space and a whole megabit of bandwidth, not just that 486 running Windows NT on a 128K ISDN link), getting your account/website nuked from your ISP was a pretty big deterrent. Today, of course, you can find bigger servers in the dumpster, and broadband is ubiquitous.

So after the safe harbor provisions are upheld and Google/Youtube are triumphant, Viacom will slink off to buy DMCA-2. DMCA-2 will be the same as DMCA, but without the safe harbor provisions for service providers. Dollar-for-dollar, the participants are evenly matched, but lobbying isn't only about dollars, it's about personal contacts, and Google doesn't have the lobbyist infrastructure in place to counter MAFIAA on their home turf.

On the contrary.

[jd]

There is nothing that politicians respond to more than cold, hard cash. Unions are maybe the next most potent weapon, as collective power IS power. Most geeks and enthusiasts don't have the former and have rejected the latter. (Idiots.) With nothing to back up any protest and with no meaningful influence, you can write all you want and all it'll do is occupy some landfills.

However, a move is something altogether different. Y'see, taxes ARE cold, hard cash. And all those listeners who aren't listening to the commercial stations' advertising? They ARE collective power. No listeners, no advertising revenue, no commercial stations.

(In England, pirate radio eventually forced the Government to license independent stations for the same reason. People defected in far too large numbers to the likes of Stockports' KFM and the monopoly crumbled from a lack of listeners. Protests never made a difference for the same reason they won't with Internet Radio. The people who need to protest most have made their voice willfully the weakest. It won't get heard. The chink of money, however quiet, will be. A politician can hear a cent coin falling on cotton candy from a thousand paces. Moving is the only voice left. If you don't use that, you've nothing left at all.)

Re:Canada? Why not anywhere else in the world?

[rantingkitten]

Indeed, my synthpop radio [mirrorshades.org] station (plug!) is similar in scope, playing mostly things from non-RIAA labels and independant artists. I, too, have my server hosted in Germany, and the RIAA can kiss my ass. There isn't a place for people to get darkwave, ebm, futurepop type stuff from conventional radio, and net radio is often the only place to turn, outside the drunken haze of a gothic nightclub.

The thing is, there ain't no Benjamens in doing this; I, like most other webcasters, shell out our own money for our own servers or bandwidth or services like live365.com, and we do it for fun and for love of the music. So far as I know, "terrestrial" stations aren't required to pay royalties in the same way, so why are we?