Today may well be known as "the day the music died." At least on the Internet. For those that don't know the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) through it's organization SoundExchange starting today will levy excessive royalty rates on music played on Internet radio. This especially is biased against the small operators as the big boys get to pay far less. The crazy thing about this is that the rates are charged per listener. The details of this you can find here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/12/court_denies_internet_radio_stay_petition/
BTW, isn't it interesting we have to go to a UK source for the story? What does this mean? Well for one thing if you listen to live internet broadcasts like I do of the local Air America Radio station like I the simple link that used to work in VLC on Ubuntu stopped working this last week. Why, well that link was replaced with a much more complex link with an authentication code which is apparently issued per listener and expires after a certain amount of time. So if your old links to your old Internet radio station have stopped working that is probably one reason why. BTW, the reason I have to listen to the local AAR station via stream is that they are at a particular frequency that gets stompted with the computer gear in this room whereas in my kitchen the radio brings the station in okay. So how do we destroy the RIAA? I am a musician and frequently record things. I've been thinking of posting a lot of little compositions online using the "Creative Commons" license that small operators can use for bumper music free. This to especially piss off the RIAA. The only think I would ask is to give me credit for the music so I if at all anything became popular I might make some money off of it through appearances. Maybe other musicians here might want to follow suite. If the RIAA comes after me then it is showdown time. Before you start sobbing for musicians most don't make money off the payments being made unless they actually wrote the song. In some cases musicians hungry to become stars and ignorant of hour the recording industry is run by hoods sign away their rights and only the publishers make money on the songs. In many cases though the musicians on the album may be credited for the tune they may not have written the tune and instead the producers purchased them from a publisher with rights to use a different credit. There are actually quite a few pop tunes that were written by amateurs who sold their song to a publisher literally for a song (i.e. $500) and a staff musician/lyricist polished it up. The U.S. Copyright Royalty Board is from Mars as far as I'm concerned. They were part of this mess. A Cambridge researcher has posted a paper that says the optimal lifespan for a copyright should only be 14 years. http://www.rufuspollock.org/economics/papers/optimal_copyright.pdf Once we destroy the RIAA maybe we can target the MPAA. After all HD video gear is getting cheaper and cheaper so why not make lots of free feature films available. Maybe the bottom line here is that capitalism no longer works in this world. Maybe it's time to bury this tired old economic system. BTW, is everyone else who downloads this list to email finding this list only is downloading slowly? Must be the NSA. All my other lists are coming down on speed. I have a 6 mbps connection and FFL is coming down like dial-up when it usually just zips down too.
