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U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Webcasting Royalties 51

Posted by timothy from the dynamite-fishing-in-the-revenue-stream dept.
reiggin writes "According to Cnet News.com, radio stations must pay copyright fees for the songs played over the internet. This upholds a previous decision of a lower court and the U.S. Copyright Office. Cary Sherman, the new RIAA president, is gleeful. Guess how the rest of us feel?"
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U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Webcasting Royalties More

U.S. Appeals Court Upholds Webcasting Royalties

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  • As long as it's not retroactive... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by lightspawn ( 155347 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:03AM (#7267328) Homepage
    Maybe it's a good thing. I hope this leads to stations broadcasting non-RIAA music, online and off. RIAA artists get enough exposure as it is.

  • What I don't get... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by alphaseven ( 540122 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:31AM (#7267496)
    What I don't get is, artists and record labels have been complaining for years how much it costs to get a song on the radio (Is it Pay for Play? [go.com]).

    With all the money labels are paying to get songs on the radio, why would they be complaining about internet radio stations doing it for free?

  • Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by idiot900 ( 166952 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:48AM (#7267539)
    As someone who was heavily involved in college radio [wustl.edu] for all of his undergraduate years, I cannot understand why the RIAA is demanding the payment of these silly royalties by radio stations who want to webcast. My alma mater spends tens of thousands of dollars each year toward radio station maintenance to advertise the RIAA's music at no cost to the RIAA. On top of this they pay things like ASCAP public performance fees. The webcast is of lower quality than the air signal (which is pretty crappy itself by the way), so from the RIAA's perspective it is clearly advertising and not a way for people to get bit-perfect copies of the music. And yet they want people to pay them for the right to advertise for them for free.

    The same record labels that demand these royalties will also happily send piles of promo CDs, related swag, free concert tickets, and on occasion an actual breathing representative to try and get college stations to play their albums.

    Seems strange to me, but maybe it's just because I'm young and idealistic...
    • Perhaps it's time to get college radio to be independent of RIAA and start playing actual college bands. Let regular radio broadcast the big dollar bands, and have college radio broadcast someone who's actually from their demographic.

      Sorry, that's sounds harsher than I mean it to, but I thought the point of college radio was first to provide a venue for potential DJ's to practice their on-air skills and second as a venue for student enjoyment.

      The best thing to do would be to kick the RIAA representative s
      • Perhaps it's time to get college radio to be independent of RIAA and start playing actual college bands. Let regular radio broadcast the big dollar bands, and have college radio broadcast someone who's actually from their demographic.

        As the law is now, not playing RIAA material is not enough to get "college radio" -- or other "independent" and "community" stations -- out of still having to give money to the RIAA in the form of statutory license fee.

    • See, there are only a handful of broadcast stations. The RIAA can easily pay for play with these stations to control the music they promote. With the internet, there are potentially millions of stations. Without these ridiculous royalty requirements, these internet stations are able to play songs other than the 20 on the list of RIAA approved songs for this format for this week. The RIAA hates this, because it makes it harder to promote the artists they want to promote this week. Notice how the only time yo
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • This is how Radio Works (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Syncdata ( 596941 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @12:49AM (#7267549) Journal
    #1: Radio station plays songs, which gain audience.
    #2: Radio station plays ads to recoup overhead, and make profit.
    #3: Record label gets some vague promise that it will have increased consumer awareness amongst consumers, thus increasing sales?
    No.
    #3 is actually: record labels get paid per song for producing the product that is garnering the audience, which is listening to the ads.
    I read a fine quote on /. recently, that Life is not all skittles and beer. [slashdot.org]

  • Loophole? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by IshanCaspian ( 625325 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @01:36AM (#7267758) Homepage
    So can I just rip cd-quality audio off of a new cd, and then "broadcast" it to one of my friends so long as I pay a penny to the RIAA?

    • 1) broadcast an encrypted stream at $0.01/hr/listener
      2) sell a DRM-enabled player for $99.95
      3) number of 'listeners' == number of players sold
      4) profit

      At 4 hrs/day/user, a $25 margin would keep the RIAA at bay for almost two years, just long enough to hype the stock and dump it before retiring to your beach home in some non-extradition-treaty country.
    • So can I just rip cd-quality audio off of a new cd, and then "broadcast" it to one of my friends so long as I pay a penny to the RIAA?

      The minimum fee was $500. Unless I am mistaken that minimum fee has been raised to $2000. You also have to comply with a truckload of restrictions and qualifications.

      The law is an oppressive burden driving actual internet radio stations out of existance. Good freaking luck trying to use it yourself.

      -
    • You could "broadcast" it to lots of your friends and then they could record copies for themselves under the audio home recording act and the RIAA couldn't say anything. On that note, could we get P2P labeled as a "broadcast/webcast" medium, so that for a relativly small webcast fee everyone could "record" whatever music they wanted to?

      Also on that note, what programs are there that will record streaming audio?
      • Winamp does, if you use the disk writer plugin. Also you could just use a standard WAV recorder and set it to record whatever audio is being sent to the soundcard.
  • "We applaud the court's ruling, affirming our view of the law that artists and record companies should be fairly compensated for the use of their music on the Internet," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America.

    I thought that the webbroadcasters were appealing paying the RIAA in addition to the artists royalties.
  • The sad thing is that if you have an internet radio at live365.com, you have to pay a royalty fee, even if your music is not RIAA music...
    • Then the market is wide open for a competitor to live365 that WILL embrace and foster the market for truly independant media.

      The only sad part of this decision is that it still holds the door open for all those established broadcasters - like the god-whore Clear Channel - to webcast all the RIAA dreck they wish. and, given clear channel's power in the market, they'll have no problem negotiating a cherry deal with the RIAA while all the "little guys" continue to flounder.

      On the upside, that's the ideal en

  • I'm sorry, but I don't get it. The stations are in it for the money; if they want to commercialise the net, why shouldn't they pay?
    • No offense, but that's an unfair generalization. Some broadcasters are only doing it as a hobby or to give their favorite artists some free exposure. The only way a station would make any money is if they played ads, which some do, but only to recoup bandwidth costs.
  • Hmmm, I predict that a lot of sites will move their sites overseas.

    Good thing this doesn't apply to European net stations.
    • Good thing this doesn't apply to European net stations.

      Several European countries have already killed their internet radio in a way similar to this. Here the radio companies had to pay per potential listener, and 'potential listener' was interpreted in court as the entire population, even if the server could handle a few hundred connections. Talk about clueless judges.


  • Why do you have a problem with this ? The copyright owners deserve to be rewarded. In fact, this is a good thing. We're talking about the Internet where webcasting can be carried out by mostly anyone (at least, the bar is lowered).

    This removes the overhead of a costly broadcasting station and probably makes it more possible for non-mainstream artists to have their content played (and remunerated). Certainly that's my experience with local AM/FM radio station: they play the independent labels rather than in
    • I'm not certain (I haven't RTA) but I thought that the Internet radio stations were paying different rates for their airplay of songs than were conventional radio stations - the Internet stations were paying for each song almost as if it were being ripped to disc for each song while the conventional radio stations do not. Thus, Internet stations are charged a significant premium for broadcasting music relative to conventional radio. Since most radio stations are comparable quality to Internet radio station
      • The RIAA's argument was that since an Internet radio station could theoretically broadcast to the entire world, whereas a terrestrial station is confined to a relatively small geographic area, Internet stations should have to pay a fee per listener.
      • the ability to rip digital copies from either medium (directly, over the Internet or via the "audio in" from the radio) is not much different, and doesn't justify the difference in cost per song per listener

        True, but most people who want to record music from the radio will do so by tape or minidisk, whereas most people who record from internet radio will record straight to disk. Cassette and MD already have a levy applied to compensate the rightsholders, whereas hard disks do not. Charging the broadcas
    • Remember, it costs money to run an Internet radio station. Bandwidth isn't free. True, some webcasters are in it for profit, and they should have to pay royalties if they're going to profit off of someone else's work. However, those stations who run ads and have subscription services only to recoup bandwidth costs and the like should be exempt, or at least not charged as much.

  • I feel like not listening to RIAA-feeding ratio stations. There is plenty of royalty-free music out there.
  • I'm just wondering ... shouldn't that be 'licensing fees', not not 'copyright fees'? How are they going to legally enforce this anyway, or keep track of who is playing what, how much they owe them, etc, etc?

  • VoIP (Score:2)

    by sheddd ( 592499 )
    Lots've local businesses here do a radio-station in the background for 'on hold' music.

    If they're using VoIP (or their phone company is using TCP/IP somewhere between the callers) isn't this technically infringing?
    • I think that regardless of whether or not the phone company uses TCP/IP, the businesses who use FM radio as MOH (music on hold) still have to pay ASCAP fees, the same way a bar, store, or restaraunt has to if they play FM radio on the premises.
  • One thing everyone should understand. This is all about the transfer of wealth. Massive quantities of it. In fact, pretty much the entirety of human endeavor since the advent of dough has been about taking something valuable out of one pocket and stuffing it into another, frequently without the stuffee's permission.

    Go back a few centuries, to (for the sake of example) the feudal period in Old England. If someone who had lots of money and property wanted more of the same, why he simply sent some of hi
    • Except they can't take our stuff. What they are "taking" is their stuff using the laws we have all lived by for decades. Those very same laws protect us from having these people do exactly what you describe - bash us on the heads (or not) and take "our" stuff. Warner Communications can no more compile my megabytes of very public usenet postings and publish them for their own profit than I can do so with Harry Potter.

      You're not going to find many people more anti-media than myself. I don't have pay TV, have

      • I think I was a little too subtle for you. I was referring to the RIAA mass-subpoena compaign, and the similar (only much worse) actions being taken by DirectTV towards purchasers of smart-card technology. These people are doing pretty much what I described, and are of much the same mindset as the old feudal lords. Who cares if people get hurt as long as I get what I want. And I might add that they have been able to do so only because they bought new law that allowed them to get away with it (i.e., the
        • I was referring to the RIAA mass-subpoena compaign, and the similar (only much worse) actions being taken by DirectTV towards purchasers of smart-card technology.

          In a thread about "U.S. Appeals court upholds webcasting royalties?"

          Uh huh. Apparently that "misguided response" bit was talking, then, about your very own post?

          You're welcome.

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