Or, why the RIAA is giving the Mafia a run for their money…
This is no doubt a little off-topic for the likes of the HouseBlog universe, but it needs to be aired to as wide an audience as I can manage. So please forgive, forget, read on, and then call/email/annoy your congressperson.
In the fall of 2002 I wrote an article for Macworld Magazine entitled iPod Therefore iSteal? in which I discussed the RIAA’s (Recording Industry Association of America) fear of uncontrolled piracy due to the ubiquity of devices capable of making exact duplicates of digital media such as CDs and DVDs.
As I stated in that article, the RIAA has a reasonable right to protect and be paid for their intellectual property and to prosecute those who are pirating said property. Unfortunately, at the time this article was written the cry rising from the music industry was black and white: Any technology that is capable of making/transporting digital copies of music was a pirating device designed to take from the RIAA what was legally theirs. Money. Fortunately, at least when it comes to digital devices like iPods and Tivos, the RIAA has backed off a bit and, as was to be expected, benefited financially from the sale of digital music.
At the very heart of the RIAA’s point of view was a very stupid and open-ended piece of legislation (read that, “written by digitally clueless elected officials who have no aversion to big-money donors”) called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The DMCA was designed to prohibit decrypting copyrighted materials, but is so broad that it affects everything from iPods and Tivos to Internet radio stations.
The article I wrote for Macworld in 2002 only focused on iPods and what that might mean to consumers of digital media that could be stored on iPods. But at the same time that iPTiS was written Internet radio stations were also being threatened with royalty fees so high as to make it impossible for these stations to operate. Fortunately these radio stations were able to strike a deal with the RIAA and the US Copyright Board. Unfortunately, that original deal has come to an end and, once again, independent radio stations that broadcast over the Internet are faced with royalty fees that for some is in excess of 125% of their income; fees that are well beyond anything being paid by their counterparts in the broadcast radio industry.
It’s difficult to understand the value of these Internet-based radio stations unless you happen to listen to one. I do pretty much every day. Personally I haven’t listened to music broadcast on a radio station since just before spandex and disco ruled the world. A damn good reason to quit, if you ask me, and I’m sad to say, there’s not much better there now. Top-40â€â€with apologies to my sister who works for Clear Channelâ€â€is a waste of the airwaves. The only real alternative is satellite or Internet radio.
Call or write your congressperson and ask them to get with the times and to make sure that reasonable royalty fees are all that these indie stations have to pay.
For an insider’s view of just how nuts this legislation is check out this post from Radio Paradise’s Bill Goldsmith. Radio Paradise is the station that I listen to, but there are literally hundreds more that stand to be trashed by this legislation.
-J