An overwrought article by Danny Bradbury, The Guardian, July 19, 2007, entitled "Web Radio Faces It's Death Knell,".

A more upbeat article on progress in the settlement talks between webcasters and copyright groups.

And another article on the settlement talks.

And another article, which suggests that webcasters could move to Canada.

And some older coverage, which includes links to the recent court decisions.

Public Broadcasting Report has some more detailed coverage. The July 20, 2007 article, "NPR Secures Three-Month Reprieve from Higher Webcasting Rates," observes that though no firm agreement had been reached:

DiMA is "prepared to accept" SoundExchange's offer to cap minimum fees per channel at $50,000, Executive Director Jonathan Potter said in a letter late Friday to Simson. Potter provided details of SoundExchange's requirement that webcasters "work to stop" stream-ripping. DiMA will "research, identify, review and evaluate the prevalence" of ripping, with an eye toward "limiting and/or eliminating" the activity, which is "disfavored by webcasters and labels alike," he said. DiMA has previously called stream-ripping a problem whose existence has been posed based only on "theoretical evidence," not case studies.

Streamripping consists of recording the mp3 stream sent out by Internet radio to one's hard drive to build up a library. More on streamripping here and here. The anti-DRM people are upset about the proposed deal's requiring measures to be taken against this, predictably. Although I suppose if enough streams get libraried in enough individual libraries, that's the death of Net Radio too.

And coverage from the Boston Globe.

It must be difficult to write these articles on deadline. But I do find myself wanting to know a good bit more about the context in which the rates decision was made before giving way and joining in the cries of "woe, woe, woe, woebegone woeful woe!" (classical scholars, what play is that from?) in which the struggle of some smaller stations becomes the Death of Internet Radio write large.

For the rates have been absurdly low for ages, although that has been somewhat corrected of late. I also find myself wondering, will the pitfalls of compulsory licensing for new technologies, illustrated by this set of problems, serve as a cautionary tale for anyone but the media involved? Or will compulsory licensing remain the darling of various IP handwringers despite this?

I lately spent an alarming amount of time and energy scraping fake brick of 1970's vintage off of the walls of our basement. The hideous stuff had to go, but there was no easy way--it was either scrape and fix the resulting holes in the drywall, or paint over it with unsatisfactory results, or replace all the drywall. Who ever thought that this was a good idea? Did someone say, "I'll just put mortar all over the walls and push these slabs of fiberboard into it and paint them like bricks, it's be great, it'll look just as bad twenty years from now as it did the day it was put up, and be nearly impossible to get rid of."

Compulsory licensing, it strikes me, is a lot like fake brick.

And last but not least, from Chris Castle, some pointed commentary on the not-at-all-well-founded complaints about Clear Channel's contract with independent artists. He also reproduces the original copy of Susan Butler's article on the subject, which later appeared in a somewhat edited format, missing the references to Professor Lessig for reasons unknown.

posted by Solveig Singleton @ 7:56 AM | Internet: P2P, Search Engines..., Media: Video, Music..., Prices, Terms, and Licensing

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