Covered already on the Voxers.
At 02:46 PM 1/28/99 -0500, you wrote:
>What if he were to say that all he is doing is broadcasting to friends. If
>he were to change his "radio format" to make it seem that way, would it
>make dif? At the least, he should dump the IRC channel or rename it to
>something else.
It still has to be licensed. If he's not charging a subscription fee for it
&/or there's no revenue stream involved, different licenses apply. But it
all has to be licensed. And more people have their fingers in this pie than
in the radio broadcasting pie. Somebody with enough money is likely to
fight that in court, but it's 50/50 that they'll lose.
tom - the $250 minimum looks right for you, but don't forget you also have
to license with BMI. And look at the DiMA and Harry Fox Agency websites;
they also have some jurisdiction. DiMA is the digital broadcasting
consortium that will attempt to hammer out a deal with RIAA that will work
for big webcasters and likely leave small webcasters shut out in the cold.
Harry Fox Agency is the company that admins mechanical rights and will be
asking you for outrageous things like a fee for copying the music from
uncompressed form to compressed form and then another fee when you copy it
from your HD to RAM and then another fee when it gets copied from your RAM
to a relay server's RAM (I'm not joking).
and Q - the loopholes that let broadcasters get away without paying fees on
non-profit stations appear to have been closed (at least for webcasting) by
the copyright protection act (see mp3.com for links) -- that was my read on
it when I went through all the legislation & licenses & stuff (but it has
momentarily been flushed from my head by other matters).
~~~
> Well, I feel like I'm the last person on planet Earth to download WinAmp and
> tune into a Shoutcast radio station, but I did this morning, and I have to
> say it totally rocked!
>
> Yeah, shoutcast still has a ways to go before it is as technically
> sophisticated as the RealPlayer -- there needs to be better feedback on how
> skippy a station will be, and the servers should be able to choke back on
> their output for slower connections, but when you get a really good station,
> it's bliss.
>
> I wonder if there will be some serious fallout over IPR reimbursement with
> these shoutcast stations. I forget exactly how it works, but radio stations
> in the US pay royalties to ASCAP (or some kind of clearinghouse
> organization). I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'll bet that
> shoutcast stations aren't doing this. Since most shoutcast stations niecly
> have their playlist online, one would think a royalty collection agency
> could write a robot to collect the playlist for a week or two, then send an
> itemized bill. The longer you play, the larger your liability...
>
> - Jim
>
>
>> My friend Tom is running his own Internet radio station. It absolutely is
>> *THE BEST* music station that I have heard in a loooooooong time.
>>
>> --wsmf shoutcast radio-<Open 24/7>--http://wsmf.org
>>
>> You need WinAmp and a PeeC
>>
>> You paste the IP address into WinAmp and connect. It alone was worth the
>> price of building Darkside.
--If you must choose between two evils, pick the one you've never tried before. ...Steven Wright