An intresting story at Salon.com. It tells the story of a streaming audio station with about 20.000 daily listeners.
A new ruling under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act threatens to change the playlist of most webstations or maybe even the shut down of most of them.
The Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, a body appointed by the U.S. Copyright Office, ruled on Feb. 20 that under the DMCA, radio stations must pay a fraction of a cent per song, per listener, for every song they stream. Under the CARP ruling, Internet-only radio stations would pay a royalty fee of 14/100 of a cent per song.
What fees were you already paying to play the music you air? |
We pay ASCAP and BMI fees. Those are the fees that go to the authors of the songs. For a noncommercial station, like us, they're about $600 a year. It depends on how much traffic you get. This year, we're going to be paying close to $1,000. It's comparable to what a college radio station would pay. If you play back music, like in a restaurant or a nightclub, you have to pay those fees.
How will that change under the CARP ruling?
The new fees would be in addition to the ASCAP and BMI fees. We did some rough calculations and found that it would cost us under the terms of that ruling about $1,000 a day.
The problem with the CARP ruling is that everybody assumed that it would be kind of like the BMI and ASCAP fees were; [that] the fees would be reasonable. We figured for noncommercial broadcasters it would be like $1,000 or $2,000 a year, and while it would hurt some of the really, really small little guys, the more serious little guys -- like us, who have a community supporting them -- would still be viable.
Read the entire story here.
While for most radio pirates (Using illegal broadcast equipment) the internet was a new legal way of bringing music to the people it seems also this will become a crime.
Source: Salon.com
