Senators aim to restrict Net, satellite radio recording

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DMCA Legislation Enables Streamrippers

I've been involved heavily in internet radio for over 3 years and running my own station ThereIsNoRadio [thereisnoradio.com] for over a year now. We are constantly trying to keep within the guidelines of the DMCA and keep streamrippers off our streams when we see them. Unfortunately streamrippers would not function in the way described in Senator Feinstein's comments if not for the DMCA. The DMCA requires that we digitally include the artist, song title, and album that we are playing in the stream. The main reason for this seems to be to ensure that the RIAA can police us by tuning into any station stream and logging all the music played so they can collect evidence of DMCA violations and get us shut down. What it does instead, is allow streamrippers to search stream lists like shoutcast and find the songs they want, connect to the stream, and record just the songs specified by the user. If we were not forced by law to send this information, the streamrippers would only be able to record a long time chunk of our stream and the end user would have to listen to it and edit the file to extract the songs they wanted without any reference points. The only internet radio stations that I know of that actually make money are backed by major corporations (yahoo, aol, clear channel) or are the internet streams of corporate terrestrial am/fm stations. The rest of us pay for our bandwidth, our royalties, our music, etc. The royalties we pay to the RIAA are not just based on the music we play and how many people hear it. Our royalties are also based on how much money we spend to run the station as well as how much we earn. They get money based on our website hosting costs as well as our website advertising revenue, which is completely separate from the streams. We also pay a percentage of what we spend for advertising and marketing for the station. Our station and lots of other stations are heard on cellphones as well, with DRM forced formats, we will have to use additional bandwidth to send our stream to the cellphone stream provider. We will also have to spend more money on stream hosting to ensure that we don't alienate any of our listeners by streaming both windows media, and quicktime or realmedia drm formats, nevermind having to find a new hosting provider that can support it. If congress would do some research and quit letting the RIAA make the laws, maybe internet radio could grow as an industry, but they are pretty successfully forcing internet radio into the realm of hobby and making the costs prohibitive for even that. We have done and continue to do everything that congress asks of us and we still get accused of enabling theft, when it is the legislation that they write that is actually enabling the theft. They were better off when it was filesharing, but due to ignorance, they have made it a lot worse for everybody involved and this is the next move to destroy the internet radio that the RIAA can neither influence nor control.

Posted by: tinradio@...   Posted on: 01/13/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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