And it hasn't stopped there. Check out this piece brought to light by John Ellis. Hollywood is getting into the act as well...

The lawyers are already at it, including those of my employer, RealNetworks. But don't expect any changes soon.

Years ago, a popular slogan was "The Internet treats censorship as failure and routes around it." The corollary not considered at the time was that some sectors of it could end up routing around the entire United States.

Occasionally I think that excessive intellectual property regimes are finally going to bring about the long-predicted death of American global pop-cultural hegemony. I don't know who our successor will be, but I think I might bet on India.

Searls errs in equating weblogging with Internet broadcasting. Webloggers create content. Internet "radio stations" "broadcast" content created by others. If I ran a Web site that posted stories verbatim from, say, books published by TOR and other science fiction imprints, you damn betcha there would be consequences! If I managed to reach some arrangement with the publishers to do this, I would not be at all surprised if I ended up having to pay fees based on how many people read each story.

There has never been any reason why Internet "broadcasters" should be free to use copyrighted materials without paying the same fees that traditional broadcasters must pay for what is essentially the same use of the same copyrighted materials. The idea that Internet "radio" should be magically immune from copyright just because it's on the Internet is hopelessly naive.

The argument that the licensing fees now being charged to Internet "broadcasters" will kill Internet "radio" assumes that Internet "radio" has an inherent right to exist. It does not. People want Internet "radio" -- a lot. So what? I want a million dollars, but that doesn't mean I'm entitled to it.

Yes, the owners of the copyrights are big corporations. So what? The same laws that protect them also protect my content, and I'm quite happy about that. If someone wants to be paid for the use of their content, they must be paid; if I advocate otherwise, I have no moral standing to demand payment for my own work, when that's what I want.

("Broadcast," "radio," and the like in quote marks above because Internet "radio" does not involve radio waves at all and is not, technically speaking, broadcasting.)

I'm surprised at this post, because you seem to be saying that the controversy about whether "Internet 'broadcasters' should be free to use copyrighted materials without paying the same fees that traditional broadcasters must pay for what is essentially the same use of the same copyrighted materials."

As I understand it, that's not true. The CARP decision, in effect, requires Internet broadcasters to pay significantly more than traditional radio broadcasters do.

Regular radio pays fees to ASCAP and BMI that go to composers, not to performers. And they are based on a station's revenues, not on a per-play/per-listener basis.

There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service.

There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug.

But Internet radio got lined up for execution because the DMCA, under pressure from a paranoid entertainment industry, characterized webcasting -- then still very young -- as something other than radio: as a "performance" delivery system, kind of like a digital venue -- a virtual club.

This characterization was born of the fear that eventually digital copies would in fact be "perfect" copies of a performance, and that therefore the artist should be compensated on a per-listen basis.

Then the DMCA based fee guidance on a "willing buyer/willing seller" concept wrapped in fuzzy and circuitous guidance language which was based in turn on the assumption that the only thing close to webcasting in prior reality was commercial radio, which has no such thing as a "willing buyer/willing seller" relationship with its audience -- only with its advertisers, which is irrelevant.

The DMCA authors ignored the example of public radio, which *does* have a seller/buyer relationship with its audience (who are customers, or at least in that position). The authors also ignored the existing webcasting successes on the Net itself, which include KPIG (which sold advertising at a higher rate because it had this bonus 2000+ people all over the world at any time, listening live) and countless other stations that put out a PayPal tip jar that collects up to $3000 and more a month in some cases.

Of course, most of these first economic models for the industry hadn't yet happened while the CARP was meeting, so they missed it. Why pause to actually observe an industry in the midst of birth? Hell, why even invite them to a meeting?

Nearly none of the major webcasters (KPIG, WCPE, Radio Paradise, SomaFM, etc.) were invited to the hearings. Live365 was, and apparently botched it by submitting and rescinding testimony, according to one RIAA guy. (That story is in Salon.)

So the CARP panel based their fees on the Yahoo example, which was worked out by Mark Cuban before he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock that he later unloaded way before the crash. Now he's known for buying big toys that most famously include the Dallas Mavericks.

Mark's plans for Broadcast.com were to scam the feds into helping him drive the small fry out of the market. He'd do that by negotiating a per-stream deal of some kind, rather than a percentage of revenue deal. That's because percentage of revenue would favor the small guys who had no revenue. Fair enough, but his scam was to agree to charges on a per-stream basis, and then multicast all the streams through one porthole, so it would be charged as just one. That porthole never got done, and was under wraps when the "Yahoo deal" was negotiated. And Yahoo has since dropped out of the radio business (wasting the whole $5.7 bil), making the CARP rationale even more absurd than it already was.

Most of this, including a highly disclosing email from Mark Cuban, is archived at RAIN.

Jerry Kindall errs in completely mistaking the value of radio play to artists. Record companies pay good payola to get their artists on the air. Airplay is promotion. Record companies actually charge artists for promotion, so artists don't get any royalties off of it. Radio is not a revenue source for artists, it's advertising. Web radio provides more (and more diverse) advertising for artists.

Wrecking web radio protects free-to-air radio's monopoly on that promotion line (and consequent control of most headline news sources to music radio listeners), and protects the record companies from losing control of artists. It benefits no one else, and the idea that recording companies have a right to prohibit web radio from playing music is simply nuts. They can negotiate individual deals with webcasters if they want, but they certainly are not entitled to tell other musicians or other companies that they can't do it.

A double dose of comment spam.

Not sure about this one, but it seems to follow the pattern.

Looks like it dates back to 24 July.

I wonder if these people know what'll happen to 'em in the next world? (Hint: red-hot coals, hornets in their nostrils, sorrow of being forever separated from God.)

You know, if I were God, I'd want to be forever separated from people with red-hot coals and hornets in their nostrils too.

Even not being God, I'd stay away.

I kind of like the 'reincarnation as potato' view, myself...

When you notice comment spam you could email it to Teresa. Then she can blacklist them. I'll do that with this thread.

Thank you, I didn't think of that. Tricky, this commenting business...

You're right. We didn't notice that one.

Thanks, guys. You're the best.

Blushes
Do I get extra credit if I point at postal code as well?
(Credit really belongs to James Macdonald for discovering it)

Wow . . . *diet plans* are posting on this blog! Some many people must have been following this one that it's become a living, sentient meme able to interact with the real world.

I wonder if accounting practices, techniques for stripping paint, and recipies will eventually start posting here.

Comment spam above.

south beach diet comment spam

From Matt McIrvin,
posted on August 2, 2002 06:15 PM:

"Years ago, a popular slogan was "The Internet treats censorship as failure and routes around it.""

Why would people have thought this? After all, if the error message 'you are not authorized to view this document' is returned, how does the *internet* know what to do?

*People*, on the other hand, may very well treat censhorship as damage, and attempt to route around it. But it's a people thing, not an internet thing.

"The corollary not considered at the time was that some sectors of it could end up routing around the entire United States.

Occasionally I think that excessive intellectual property regimes are finally going to bring about the long-predicted death of American global pop-cultural hegemony. I don't know who our successor will be, but I think I might bet on India."

The big uncertainty in all of this (including thing's like Charlie Stross' warning to watch for currency controls on the part of the US, as a late-stage symptom of fascism), is that the US is so huge and powerful. It's not one of several top-tier nations attempting to do radical things, it's *the* top tier nation telling the rest of the world what to do, when the rest of the world starts at tier-2 and works down from there.

If you want to look at the spammer/scammer's web page without showing them who you are, use this resource: http://samspade.org/t/safe

There must be something about this particular post that draws comment spam

Huh. That was a characteristic of the Lolita spams -- subsequent waves would hit all the threads spammed in previous waves, and add a few more. Wonder if we're seeing the same guys over and over?