A Reprieve For Net Radio?

Porsupah writes "The Register reports that "Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA) and Rep. Don Manzullo (R-IL) have headed the 'Internet Radio Equality Act,' which aims to stop the controversial March 2 decision which puts royalty of a .08 cent per song per listener, retroactively from 2006 to 2010 on internet radio," as imposed by a recent decision from the Copyright Royalty Board. "If passed, today's bill would set new rates at 7.5 percent of the webcaster's revenue — the same rate paid by satellite radio.""

Good to Hear

[ror]

Well that's a result! Hopefully these guys will make good progress. In the end though with net radio streams getting higher and higher quality how long will it be before people use net radio as a content distribution mechanism with an excuse to get around copyright?

Re:Good to Hear

[eggman9713]

Why download hundreds of mp3s when I can listen to the same music streaming from the internet?

Because iPods don't have wifi yet.

Skepticism

[Dr. Eggman]

"If passed, today's bill would set new rates at 7.5 percent of the webcaster's revenue -- the same rate paid by satellite radio."

My first question would be "what were the rates/pay scheme before this whole mess with CRB's decision was imposed?" Are we really seeing a good decision, or are we seeing an attempt to dupe people into seeing a good decision while still getting some of the increase those who convinced the CRB, wanted to see?

Does it require _effective_ DRM?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about someone who adopts a feeble DRM scheme, just as a ploy to satisfy the letter of the law? In the end, ALL DRM schemes are defeated eventually. Anyone who complains about the insufficiency of a particular webcaster's DRM could be confronted with a list of current workarounds for all of the supposedly current forms of DRM, thus illustrating the foolishness of the concept.

Re:Good to Hear

[ror]

FM isn't lossless; It's concievable people will be able to stream lossless audio streams on home connections in the near future. In fact, people could stream multi-track lossless streams. They could stream an entire Album in lossless format in the length for the longest song to play. Multi-track streaming is something that net radio can really offer over traditional radio, with little effort you can have alternate playlists, with the same inter-song content and advertising. However this could be easily set up as a lossless distribution center. I'm not against piracy, but I have my own ideas about how I'd use an excuse of net radio to aid distribution.

Re:Good to Hear

[morgan_greywolf]

FM isn't lossless;

In the 60s and 70s, FM radio, unlike its predecesoor AM radio, was about as close to lossless as it got. That's why the RIAA tried to block the adoption of FM -- people could record music off the air! People would stop buying records!

And net radio, MP3, AAC, etc. aren't lossless either. Sure, there's things like FLAC, but lossless encoding eats up a lot of space and bandwidth very quickly.

Re:Skepticism

[ps236]

It sounds pretty much like what the webcasters wanted. They wanted a reasonable percentage of their revenue as the smaller webcasters have had previously. I can't remember exactly what it was previously but it was around the 6-10% mark IIRC.

The problem with the CRBs desire was that they wanted around 110% of the webcasters' revenue.... I looked at the figures, and although the royalty per 'performance' looked teeny, once you added it up it was pretty obvious there was no way that amount could be earned by advertising, the webcasters would have to either have a second method of income (as Yahoo, AOL etc do), or charge a quite large subscription ($20-ish per month)

Personally I don't have a problem with a royalty per performance, but it had to be at least an order of magnitude lower than the proposed royalty scheme. The problem (from RIAAs POV) with 'percentage of revenue' is that a webcaster who has a very low revenue (eg a hobbyist webcaster) essentially pays no royalties at all.

If this "percentage of revenue" proposal does go through, then I hope the RIAA learn (but doubt they will) and the next time this comes up they come up with something more reasonable and less greedy and manipulative. If they'd proposed a royalty per performance scheme of 1/10th their actual proposal, then the chances are most webcasters would have accepted it without much more than a grumble, and the RIAA would get more than they would with a 7.5% of revenue scheme..

I run a net radio station

[fury88]

I run one of the more popular net electronic stations out there and I am of course glad to see this. I am also an artist and I have no problems with equality on the internet. It's clearly the way to go and I think people will becoming more creative with out to make money out of net radio. Right now I am not profitable at all. I split the cost with 3 guys and I carry most of the load of maintenance.

Re:What constitues a "broadcast"

[adwarf]

You have to put in some protections, like you can't let someone choose their song 'on demand.' Which means you must limit the amount of songs a person can skip, you can't let them rewind or replay something that streamed. You also have to make a reasonable effort to prevent copying. I'm sure there are more rules those are just the ones I know off the top of my head.