Internet Broadcasting: The Players Trying To Kill It

All,

Short version: Record companies, having lobbied Congress with half-truths about the nature of Internet Broadcasting, now want to use their newly-materialized royalty-defining muscle to make it harder for Internet Stations to exist.  Your favorite Internet station may fall victim.

I tossed out an opening salvo about this over the weekend, here:

http://www.dailykos.com/...

..and so this is a bit of a diary rescue, but also a response to one comment that made a lot of sense: I (letting passion get before logic...again) needed to do a better job explaining who the acronyms I mentioned represent.

Fortunately, it appears there's someone who can do a better job than I could ever hope to...after the break.

Very quickly, the players are:

• Internet Broadcasters, of which I am one. (My station, Altrok Radio, plays a variety of modern-rock/alterna/punk/new-wave.)
  
• Songwriters, represented by ASCAP, BMI and SESAC - the organizations that collect their royalties.
  
• The recording industry, represented by the RIAA, who never got a royalty on recordings they expected to sell because airplay was regarded as advertising...until they started claiming the Internet changed everything.  And now they want more.
  
• Congress, which displays a well-documented and bipartisan lack of intuition about technical matters, and were led to believe things that are not true by the lobbying of the RIAA.
  
• The DMCA, passed by Congress to make Internet Broadcasting legal with one hand, while giving the RIAA the means to kill it with the other.
  
• SoundExchange, the designated collector of royalties for recordings proscribed by the DMCA.
  
• Recording artists, who find themselves just as screwed out of these new royalties as they are out of sales profits for their recordings, but are still trotted out by the RIAA whenever they need to present someone who "gets hurt" by the lack of royalties they were never entitled to in the first place.
  
• Terrestrial (traditional) broadcasters, who on one hand remain blissfully unencumbered by the DMCA when broadcasting over the air, but who'd like to expand further on the Internet, and would prefer that they enjoy the same programming freedom there that they do on the air.
  

There's a LOT more about the history, the players, and a well-explained conclusion, written by an actual legal expert (unlike myself) here:

http://polloloco.blogspot.com/...

My biggest goal in writing this is to keep up a level of warning about how your favorite Internet station may have to cease operations, if the record companies get their way.