suck it, library of congress & copyright royalty board

Here are some interesting words from Bill Goldsmith, the creator, owner, and DJ of Radio Paradise:

There's a lot of talk going on in webcasting circles about what constitutes a fair performance royalty rate for Internet radio. I have a radical suggestion: how about the same amount paid by FM stations? In other words - at this point - nothing. Why do we pay these royalties when FM stations don't? Because we're providing "perfect digital copies" of individual songs to our listeners, rather than engaging in the creation of traditional radio programming. The fact that this reasoning, which is the foundation of the differentiation between analog & digital broadcasting in the DMCA, is *just not true* is rarely discussed.

When I share with my listeners the discrepancy between what we pay in performance royalties & what an FM station pays ($0) they are flabbergasted and outraged. These are people who *know* that listening to Radio Paradise is no different from listening to an FM station (except for better programming :-) and the idea that we're fundamentally different because we transmit digitally seems absurd. It seems absurd because it *is* absurd - and every time the issue comes up, my blood pressure rises all over again.

While it is possible to "rip" a radio stream into individual songs, you can do the same thing - with little more effort, and with similar results in terms of audio quality - with an analog FM broadcast. If you were to take a random sampling of, say, RIAA attorneys (or Senators) and play them a song copied from my webcast and the same song copied from an analog FM station, I doubt that they'd be able to tell the difference.

Based on the feedback I get from my listeners, only a very small percentage ever record our station for any reason, and most of them are recording blocks of programming for playback during commute times or in other situations where they don't have access to the net. The vast majority of them just turn the station on and listen, just as they would do with an FM broadcast. No wonder they are astounded to find out that Congress - under the careful guidance of the RIAA - decided back in 1998 that we were an entirely different type of service that needed to play (and pay) by an entirely different set of rules.

Is it fair that FM broadcasters pay nothing to the owners of performance copyrights? Perhaps not. In most countries, they *do* pay. But is it fair for the recording industry to try to right this supposed wrong in such a manner that it drives law-abiding business people such as myself and the other independent webcasters out of business? I think not. Perhaps the most fair solution of all would be a significantly smaller royalty (something comparable to the 3.5% or so that both webcasters and broadcasters pay to songwriters) applied to *all* forms of radio.