Barefootsies

2007 Copyright Royalty Changes

In 2007, the United States Copyright Royalty Board passed a rate increase in the royalties payable to performers of recorded works broadcast on the internet.

The rates include a minimum fee of $500 (U.S.) per year, per channel with escalating fees for each song played. In 2006 (the decision is retroactive), the applicable fee would be $0.0008 per performance. Since a performance is defined as streaming one song to one listener, a webcaster with 10,000 listeners would pay 10,000 times the going rate for every streamed song. The fee structure increases each year with rates that more than double by 2009."[4]

If enforced, this decision will undermine the business models of many Internet radio stations.[5]

According to a report released in March 2007, under the newly proposed rates, annual fees for all station owners are projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2008. This figure is more than four times that for terrestrial radio broadcasters who, due to terms set forth in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are exempt from the additional royalties imposed on digital broadcasting outlets, which compensate the performers of recorded works. Both terrestrial radio and Internet/digital radio broadcasters are responsible for royalties collected by performance rights organizations (ASCAP, BMI, SESAC) on behalf of the composers of recorded works.

Many performers of recorded works have voiced their opposition to the Copyright Royalty Board's rate increases, fearing that the rate increases would cripple the internet broadcasters that have given them valuable exposure. Others have proposed moving Internet broadcasts to foreign jurisdictions where US royalties do not apply. "For example, Mercora, a service that allows individuals to launch their own webcasts, has established a Canadian site that falls outside U.S. regulatory and royalty rules."[4][6]

On 26 April 2007, a new bill was proposed to reverse the CRB's decision.[7]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18384667/site/newsweek/

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seeric

yeah that shit is gonna end a lot of online radio

Barefootsies

Fucking greed.

All it will do, like just about anything else, is drive US companies offshore. This shit is getting ridiculous. The US will drive a lot of e-commerce out of the US losing all that money.

The RIAA is just a greedyfucking company that ultimately hurts the artists in the end. Not that the industry cares about them anyways..

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Yngwie

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Barefootsies

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Yngwie

I listen to pirate radio every day - http://www.kqlz.org and they mention this whole situation all the time.

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Murderous

Just as I was about to unleash something VERY nice, they pull that shit. It has set me back just a TINY bit, but I think I am going to wait it out before I get too deep.

Fucking sucks.

Brad

maybe artists should concentrate on putting out solid albums and playing good live shows. I can list a few shows that I have seen in the past few months that were well below par.

I am getting a little sick of this RIAA crap. They are only hurting the artists and making it harder for the little record companies to compete with the big guys. They need to look into why more and more people are turning to internet radio as a source of new music. I would venture to guess that it is because there is more variety in the playlists, less comercials, and in genreal they play more listenable music.

I stopped listneing to the radio probably about 10 years ago and have recently been using myspace to find new music. I have a crap load of music on my computer and on CDs and records. I can't stand listening to the same Nickleback song or whoever the flavor of the week is. Even the stations that play "classic" rock seem to play the same fucking songs from the same artists day in and day out. For example, the station that I am thinking of plays "Hey Hey, My My" whenever they play Neil Young and does the same with all of the other bands they play. What's the poing in subjecting myself to that crap when I could easilly open iTunes or put on a cd or record that will play better music?

The radio is dead to me and I assume that it will be dead to the world soon if the record companies don't stop pushing their adgenda on the program directors. Although I guess there will always be people who could care less if they hear Nickleback and U2 twice an hour with 20 minutes of commercials.

Fuck the RIAA, they couldn't tell their assholes from their heads if the lights were turned off.

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Xenophage

LOL this thread is quite funny in a lot of ways.

Barefootsies

Same here.

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Sosa

yep, almost every online radio station I listen to mentions this.

Barefootsies

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Xenophage

LOL and I should have no love either way since I spent a lot of money fighting with the RIAA, I have not bought or downloaded a single song or CD in the last 7 years as a boycott to the industry. The only new music I have listened to was on XM or music I was given.

Barefootsies

They wanted to take away your pimphat?

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Xenophage

They wanted a lot more than the hat lemme tell ya

Barefootsies

Considering it's the RIAA, they probably wanted your first born.

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woj

yea, no kidding...

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Barefootsies

Sun Microsystems' bread and butter is selling general-purpose servers, but on Wednesday the company began selling an extremely specialized product designed to cram as many streams of video onto the Internet as possible.

The Sun Streaming System consists of video-streaming software, a handful of ordinary Sun servers, Sun Fire X4500 "Thumper" storage systems and the highlight, the X4950 Streaming Switch. In a top-end $8 million configuration, the X4950 holds 2 terabytes of memory and 32 10-gigabit-per-second Ethernet ports, and can pump out 160,000 simultaneous video streams onto the network.

Most TV shows today are broadcast over the air or cable distribution networks, but Sun's new system lets people select which shows they want to see and when they want to see them. This "video on demand" world resembles ordering DVDs through the mail with Netflix or watching recorded video using TiVo, only the TiVo is a server that doesn't run out of hard-drive space and the movies are sent nearly instantly over the Internet through a technology called IPTV--Internet Protocol television.

Although the Sun Streaming System is on the fringe of Sun's product line, it once was the core product of a start-up, Kealia, that Sun acquired in 2004. That wasn't just any old acquisition: it brought to the company its general-purpose "Galaxy" line of x86 servers and returned to Sun one of its co-founders, Andy Bechtolsheim.

People want their video delivered on their own schedules, Bechtolsheim said, and Sun is intercepting that trend.

"Blockbuster is already history," Bechtolsheim said, replaced by Netflix, and Netflix's current model will be replaced by video on demand.

Frank Dickson, an analyst with iSuppli, called Sun's product "an impressive system. The design is very well thought through," and the price is reasonable. However, he said, video-on-demand hardware is a "niche market," with spending estimated to reach only $60 million this year.

The prime candidates for Sun's product are telecommunications companies, he said. "Telco is anxious to be in the video-viewing market," he said. Cable companies' infrastructure is less amenable to video on demand, he added, because many subscribers share the same bandwidth, an issue that has limited current video-on-demand offerings.

Sun's streaming system employs several features desirable to consumers, including the ability to fast-forward or rewind at various speeds. It requires a set-top box that can communicate with the central servers, but it's designed to work with inexpensive models. Alternatively, a PC can be used to receive the video streams.

Bechtolsheim recognizes that merely having the hardware and software to send video streams is only one part of an overall video-on-demand ecosystem that must be built. Other aspects include relationships between content suppliers such as movie studios and those who control the networks that deliver content to consumers' homes, chiefly cable TV or phone companies.

"The legal issues behind video distribution are humongous," Bechtolsheim said.

And it's taking time to build that system. Bechtolsheim pitched his technology to potential customers in 2003 and 2004, and they said they'd be deploying video on demand on a broad scale in 2005 and 2006. That proved premature.

"We were a little early, quite frankly, but it works now," he said.

Paula Patel, head of Sun marketing for the video system, argues that it's better to store video information in central servers than on personal video recorders that run out of capacity. A single standard-definition movie typically takes about 4GB of space, so it would take about 10 24-terabyte Thumper systems--few enough to fit into a single 6-foot rack--to hold Netflix's current 60,000-title library, Bechtolsheim said.

Sun's system pumps data onto other switches from Cisco Systems, Nortel Networks or others that ultimately handle routing it to individual destinations. However, many Internet subscribers today don't have the capacity to handle 2 megabit-per-second standard-definition video or 8-megabit-per-second high-definition video.

But iSuppli's Dickson said the network should be able to keep up with the new burden of video streaming.

"In general, bandwidth does not seem to be a problem," he said. "The goal of these systems seems to be to deliver content within a 'walled garden' much like (Verizon's) Fios or (AT&T's) U-verse. The telecommunications companies will provision the network to provide the quality of service needed. As long as the holy grail of triple-play revenues exist"--customer spending on networks for video, phone and Internet access--"bandwidth limitations are not an issue."

Sun's Streaming Switch name could imply that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is getting into competition with networking switch giants such as Cisco, but it's not really accurate to call the product a switch, Bechtolsheim said.

"It's a server with a bunch of 10-gigabit ports," he said.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9584_22-6...feed&subj=zdnn

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Barefootsies

Google's finally responded to the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube exactly as many predicted it would: by taking the common carrier defense provided in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Whether that defense will work is up to the courts. But Google is in a much better position to defend itself against copyright violation changes than peer-to-peer networks were several years ago, when music companies went after the likes of Grokster and the original Napster for similar offenses. For one, Google's YouTube has always limited the length of video clips that you can upload to its service, making users have to work much harder if they want to share full-length copyrighted material. For another, YouTube has a take-down mechanism in place, and has indicated that it would comply with copyright holders when asked to remove material. Plus it does use tools to try to filter out copyrighted content from being uploaded in the first place--however ineffective Viacom argues them to be--and is working on improving those tools even now.

But more than that, unlike P2Ps, YouTube doesn't depend on copyrighted material for its success. A recent study by Vidmeter.com said that less than 10 percent of the site's most popular videos were owned by copyright holders who want them gone, as fellow PC World blogger Cathy Lu pointed out. Even if the study's numbers are too low, as Viacom and other content owners allege, it seems clear that a significant portion of YouTube's appeal and success owes nothing to copyrighted content.

In addition, Google Video has content deals in place with some copyright owners and has shared ad revenue with them, a practice that is migrating to YouTube. That makes Google look much more like a partner than a pirate.

That doesn't mean Viacom doesn't have a good case. Despite the take down notice Viacom served YouTube, the sheer volume of content on YouTube practically guarantees that some Viacom material remains on the site (as has been demonstrated), which also means that the tools meant to catch such content aren't doing a thorough job.

As others have said, it's unlikely that YouTube will go away, no matter what the outcome of the court case. As it was in the court case against P2Ps, what's really at stake here is the standard that Google and other Web service providers will have to meet in order to protect themselves in the event that users upload and share copyrighted content on their service.

The Supreme Court delivered a fairly balanced opinion on that score with the Grokster decision in 2005. If this case gets that far--and it very well may--one can only hope that the court does so again.

http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/004286.html

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