Janice Brooks
From:
Pleasant Gap Pa
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Posted 7 Dec 2002 7:16 am |
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Bush Signs Net Radio Act
By David McGuire
washingtonpost.com Staff Writer
Thursday, December 5, 2002; 11:55 AM
President Bush Wednesday approved a reprieve for a clutch of Internet radio stations facing extinction under government-mandated music royalty rates.
The legislation that Bush signed is designed to resolve a longstanding dispute over how much money Internet radio stations should pay for the privilege of "webcasting" copyrighted music. Congress approved the legislation last month.
The legislation does not establish specific royalty rates for webcasters. Instead, it authorizes the music industry's principal royalty collector, SoundExchange, to negotiate binding royalty contracts with small webcasters on behalf of all artists and record labels.
Without the bill, webcasters would have been required to pay royalties under a plan established by the Library of Congress. In June, Librarian of Congress James Billington ruled that Internet radio stations should pay a royalty rate of .07 cents per-song, per-listener. Regardless of their size and financial resources, webcasters would have been required to pay those rates retroactively to the 1998 passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
When a coalition of small webcasters complained that the retroactive royalty rates could drive them out of business, Congress stepped in to broker a compromise between those companies and the recording industry.
Out of those negotiations came a bill that would have allowed small webcasters to pay a fixed percentage of either their revenues or their expenses in lieu of the per-song rate.
The webcasting legislation, a compromise sponsored by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Jesse Helms, (R-N.C.), also includes a six-month stay of royalty payments for noncommercial webcasters. Helms blocked the original bill out of concern that it could have harmed some religious broadcasters, according to sources close to the situation.
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Janice "Busgal" Brooks
ICQ 44729047
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chas smith R.I.P.
From:
Encino, CA, USA
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Posted 9 Dec 2002 6:53 pm
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| I have a friend who is a webcaster. He was saying that the economics for webcasting is much different than with terrestrial radio. He doesn't have the advertising resources or record company payoffs available to him and that the higher royalty rate would have put him out of business. Of course, I'm for higher royalties, but that's looking at it from his perspective. |
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