Cross-Posted on My Left Wing
Please read and recommend this diary. This is an eleventh-hour appeal and I want to get this in front of as many eyeballs as possible. While we actively discuss compelling issues on every front, there is another issue that I hope you can add to your agenda.
I've diaried previously here and here about the immediate issue of Internet Radio being forced to pay ruinous and discriminatory 'royalty' fees. This situation has not changed and has in fact come to a head. The new US Copyright Board rules are set to take effect next week.
And yet, there is a glimmer of hope.A small effort now could pay off heavily for our culture and the arts down the road.
Please follow me below...
As a brief summary of this issue, I'll selectively quote from my previous diaries...
If you care at all about music, about art, about having a touch of color in your lives, about having a piece of your life that exists outside of the corporate Borg, you need to read this diary and recommend it.
Money is not involved. Your precious time, however, is really needed...
The music is about to die. The coup de grace is about to be administered by the U.S. Copyright Office...
It turns out that the U.S. Copyright Board has unilaterally issued a new set of royalty guidelines that must be exclusively adhered to by every Internet webcaster in the US. Authorized by the DMCA, passed by a Republican Congress (with the active connivance of many Democrats) and signed into law by Bill Clinton.
All this while the oligopolistic Clear Channel Corporation, and every other horrid vanilla wasteland FM and AM radio conglomerate, pay virtually no royalties at all by comparison (h/t to Kestrel9000 for the correction).
That's right, folks - the biggest media companies pay no artist royalties. The only people who get payments of any kind from Big Media are the copyright holders, which are invariably the record companies.
Instead, Web radio is being forced to pay royalties in a fashion that would instantly bankrupt them, under terms that the big corporate radio companies don't even have to consider, using nonsensical technical distinctions drawn within the DMCA language between analog wavelength signals and digital broadcasting through multicast protocols. The conclusions within this legislation favor two ologopolies - the big radio companies such as Clear Channel, and the big record companies including Warner Music and Sony. All this is deliberate and very much intended to shut down new and emerging markets and to defend the incumbent ologopolies from the consequences of free competition.
Now, at the eleventh hour, our friend Rep. Jay Inslee (WA-01) has just introduced a new bill to enforce some equity in the situation. Rep. Inslee understands how important it is to continue to encourage technological innovation and equity in communications, as he is a major sponsor of Net Neutrality legislation.
The details of this short bill require a clear and simply royalty regimen that enforces a measure on consistency and fairness:
STANDARD FOR DETERMINING RATES AND
TERMS.—Section 114(f)(2)(B) of title 17, United States
Code, is amended by striking ‘‘Such rates and terms shall
distinguish’’ and all that follows through the end of clause
(ii) and inserting the following: ‘‘The Copyright Royalty
Judges shall establish rates and terms in accordance with
the objectives set forth in section 801(b)(1). Such rates
and terms may include a minimum annual royalty of not
more than $500 for each provider of services that are subject to such rates and terms, which shall be the only minimum royalty fee and shall be assessed only once annually
to that provider.’’.
(b) TRANSITION RULE.—Except for services covered
by section 118 of title 17, United States Code, each provider of digital audio transmissions that otherwise would
have been subject to the rates and terms of the determination of the Copyright Royalty Judges made ineffective by
section 2 of this Act shall instead pay royalties for each
year of the 5-year period beginning on January 1, 2006,
at one of the following rates, as selected by the provider
for that year:
(1) 0.33 cents per hour of sound recordings transmitted to a single listener.
(2) 7.5 percent of the revenues received by the
provider during that year that are directly related to
the provider’s digital transmissions of sound recordings.
This is the nub. The bill directs the Copyright Board to nullify its previous rate decisions and in their place institute a 5-year period during which Web radio providers can opt to pay either a single-listener/hour rate or a reasonable percentage of their revenues from their Internet broadcasts. The 7.5% rate represents a significant discount from what the Web Radio stations have actually been paying for the last few years (I believe it's somewhere above 10%) but also still represents a significant hike above what terrestrial providers pay--which is, specifically, nothing.
The FCC is also directed to study the effect of Draconian royalty rates on the competitiveness, diversity and localism of all radio market, including Web radio:
the Federal Communications Commission shall sub
mit to the Copyright Royalty Judges a report on the effect
of proposed rate determinations in the proceedings on lo13
calism, diversity, and competition in the Internet radio
marketplace. The report shall include the Commission’s
views on the effects of the proposed rate determinations
on—
(1) localism, diversity, and competition in rural areas;
(2) diversity of programming, including foreign
language programming; and
(3) competitive barriers to entry into the Internet radio market.
This clause is evidently intended to encourage the analysis by other communications organizations on this issue before the current 5-year period ends. Inslee's bill does not apply in perpetuity; it ends in January 2011. Presumably, by that time, the market will be better understood by other communications-related government bureaucracies and the Copyright Office will hence be encouraged to institute more reasonable rules instead of being ramrodded by a few oligarchs in specific industries.
Final Appeal
PLEASE call your congressperson about Inslee's Internet Radio Equality Act. Here is a place to go for more specific information. I know this sounds like a narrow, parochial, almost irrelevant concern compared with all the foolishness we are all now confronting. But a few minutes of your time calling your Rep's office would be most helpful right now.
Even a Republican has stepped up to support this bill. Can't we do the same?
Instead of repeating myself, allow me to offer a not-so-freakin-brief quote from my first diary on the subject:
Music is the art that has sustained mankind for hundreds of years. Palestrina, Corelli, Bach, Beethoven, Gershwin. Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, Art Tatum, Charlie Parker, Billie Holliday, John Coltrane. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Johnny Cash, and on and on. None of these people were what you'd call normal, or blessed with common sense. But their work brightens our lives. Just about all of them (well, maybe not Gershwin) have one thing in common. They were rebels and serious nonconformists. And they were talented.
And you will never hear any of them on mainstream Clear Channel-style radio. To whole generations of people in this country, many of them are utterly a mystery. It will be all I can do to pass them on to my five-year-old daughter, who is just beginning to be aware that such things exist...
But spare a thought for one of the most precious things that we are fighting for.
Without Web radio, the Pat Boones and Kingston Trios of the 21st Century - replaced now by Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake - will once again hold uninterrupted sway over popular culture, and this time every little mouse hole that people with talent could previously use to escape and carve their little niche will be gone...
Life is not just about getting and spending - or conforming. It is about beauty, and art, and music, and the light that emerges when people of like mind share experiences that are not measured by money, that drift away on waves of sound, to be preserved and cherished in memory like a flickering candle of joy.
It is about seeing little children's faces light up when you play and sing a song for them - performed and paid for by volunteers because the schools don't pay for art or drama or music teachers anymore, which they did when I was growing up...
In the United States, Bill Clinton's horrible DMCA and the U.S. Copyright Board are about to kill the music for real.
Our defenseless musical artists huddle around flickering campfires scattered in the howling wasteland of American culture, playing their chords and notes of defiance and life. The huge black wolves circle just outside the campfire's light.
If you have ever bought a CD in your life, you need to speak out now to your political representatives.
If you have grown bored with listening to your music collection and wondered why no good music ever seems to be available anymore, you need to speak up now.
If you are a musician - in academia, in a bar band, or a dedicated plunker and late-night bar jam participant like I am - you need to speak out now.
If you love music and go to live shows to support music, YOU NEED TO SPEAK UP NOW, MORE THAN EVER!
Please, please spare a few cycles from your busy day.
Please spare a few cycles to try to help those who only want to give us art and beauty without being crushed by the Fascist machine.
Please help.
I can say no more. I have worked pretty hard on this and have sent correspondence to several Senators and several Congresspeople. Now, as my last action, I'm begging everyone who reads this to recommend this diary and help get this in front of as many eyeballs as possible.
We need your help. You won't regret it.
Please support the Internet Radio Equality Act.