In addition to the retroactive rates for performance royalties for webcasts, due to come down sometime later today, it appears that the reporting requirements for webcasters under the statutory license may be the straw that broke the camels back, so to speak. In addition to the amount of work and burden it places on any webcaster, you can imagine the problems this creates for college stations, where the budgets are almost non existent, and the staff are usually volunteers.

I received the following email this morning from one webcaster. It is reproduced with his permission.

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Hello,
I run an on line station playing many artists from the Chicago area.
The RIAA with the help of the copyright office has suggested new laws that make it nearly impossible for the smaller on-line only radio stations to broadcast music. If this law or rules are allowed to stand, independent bands will have even fewer avenues for exposure to the public. The rules/law can be viewed here.

The datapoints that that this law requires are very hard for and independent broadcaster to gather. Some require you to join the RIAA to gather. Others may violate a listeners privacy.

Here are the datapoints that must be reported to the RIAA

A) The name of the service
B) The channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID)
C) The type of program (archived/looped/live)
D) Date of transmission
E) Time of transmission
F) Time zone of origination of transmission
G) Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program
H) Duration of transmission (to nearest second)
I) Sound recording title
J) The ISRC code of the recording
K) The release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track
L) Featured recording artist
M) Retail album title
N) The recording label
O) The UPC code of the retail album
P) The catalog number
Q) The copyright owner information
R) The musical genre of the channel or program (station format)

And a listener's log listing:
1) The name of the service or entity
2) The channel or program
3) The date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone)
4) The date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone)
5) The time zone where the signal was received (user)
6) Unique user identifier
7) The country in which the user received the transmissions

This is ridiculous. I hope that you get help get the word out on this since it was released very quietly!

Tom Printy
www.goonsquadradio.com

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links:
The Radio and Internet Newsletter
Radio Horizon

This affects internet radio all the way down to the non-profit college stations. These laws must be opposed, if not extremely amended.

Oh, and... 1st post!

This is a proposal right now, and the copytight office is taking comments until March 11th according to the Radio Horizon link above...

copytight -- that's great.

That's Called a Freudean Slip...

heh, yeah but it works.

Love the direct invasion of privacy and the trampeling over our right with this decision. How the hell can they get away with the "Unique user identifier"? This is just one of the many things which is SO GOD DAMN WRONG about this. All this will do will further destroy our ecomony and make the rich richer and the general public poorer. They aim to make these "fee's" retroactive from all the way to 1998 on top of that and the rates are pretty damn steep. This will spell DEATH for any independant webcaster which is not a copyright owner. Just like the attack on innovation stalled our ecomony to begin with, as long as these sorts of decisions are being made, investors will not proceed to further invest in innovative companies because the laws are so slanted towards copyright owners that if you are not one you can not fairly compete. Trust me when I say this is not the end of my rant on this...

The RIAA and their tyrant rule over music lacks common sense and judgement sense alot of their judgements are made in greed and paranoia. These new rules will make it just a bit harder for underground artists to surface whether they're a band trying to come up or a tight skilled mc tryin to stretch his rep from street corner cyphers to the public. Since these rules will cause just as much inconvience (if not more) as it does convience it makes you wonder who they consult before making such drastic rule changes. Especially with stuff that includes the invasion of privacy on the user end

That's it...drive the "legal" services into the ground, in your attempt to control every bit of the process, I'm starting to visualize closed networks of sharing. College dorm to college dorm. The network at work, everyone pulls from the same server, in house. Can you say 802.11B?
It's a musical day in the neighborhood,
A sharing day in the neighborhood.......
won't you be my access..

WOW!!!!! Good points -X-... wth is up widat? I have to now "give" my information to the RIAA so they can plug my email box with useless crap, or track my online browsing? I know I know.. this sounds paranoid, but.. think about it.. it's not all that far fetched.
Oh.. they forgot to mention the name of the firstborn daughter of the second wife of the drummer's wife in that list. that's GOTTA be at least as important as the "Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program" or.. for those of us who can read legalspeak somewhat.. TRACK NUMBER!! duh.. get a clue RIAA..
I wanna know tho.. isn't ANY of this against some sort of law? I mean.. Bill G(r)ates aka The Antichrist pulled a lot less shit than this.. and he got TOTALLY raked (YAY!!!)... over the coals... I'm kinda wondering why the DOJ hasn't looked into this.. privacy violations, personal property rights, .. and I'll say it.. FOURTH AMMENDMENT!!!!!! *duck*

Thanks for listening to station KREM.. more opinions as they develop....

From Hilary Rosen's speech at the web development conference...
"“The question isn’t whether peer-to-peer or any other particular technology is good or bad,” said Rosen. “The question is whether they’re going to be used—whether they’ll respect what artists create just like we in the recording business respect what the business sponsors and software developers in this audience create.”
oh bullshit

Mike, Bill, I think you both couldn't be more on the mark.