By Doc Searls
On Monday, July 30, the U.S. Copyright Office convened the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (yes, CARP) to make some decisions about the conditions under which webcasters will be required to make royalty payments. The results could be highly inconvenient for webcasters of all kinds. Howard Greenstein, a webcasting pioneer, puts it this way:
Webcasters, many of whom have been accounting for what they have estimated they would have to pay under a negotiated compulsory license (and putting aside revenue for years) are about to find out (within 60 days) what it will cost them. Unless, of course, they are an "interactive" station. If you're a standard station under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, you play music in a certain way. You don't give people much choice about what they hear.
Yet the number of streaming sources on the Net runs into uncounted thousands (or perhaps millions, if you include Napster at its peak). What's more, many of these are far more interactive than traditional broadcasting has never been, or can even comprehend.
That's because a high degree of incomprehension was built into commercial broadcasting from the beginning as a matter of architectural design: its consumers and customers have always been different populations. See, commercial broadcasters are not in business to play music, or to distribute any other kind of "content" (a term popularized by dot-coms in the late Nineties). Commercial broadcasters are in business to sell advertising. Their consumers are actually the product they sell to advertisers. The songs you hear on commercial radio are just bait. You pay nothing for them.
But the stations do pay. Their bait shops are BMI and ASCAP, the ancient organizations to which they are compelled by law to pay for everything they play. The proceeds are then distributed by those organizations back to the artists. (This applies to noncommercial stations too, only at a lower rate. ASCAP's details are here.)
The Net obsoleted this system long before Napster came along. That's why the big industrial players pushed the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) through Congress way back in 1998. Long before that (in 1992) the AHRA (Audio Home Recording Act) was pushed through Congress for roughly the same reason: to protect the incumbent music distribution system. That system is one in which "consumers" are not welcome to participate except as customers of physical recordings.
The DMCA has already been influencing commercial broadcasting in a quiet, pernicious way. Ever wonder why radio stations don't tell you exactly what they intend to play in the next hour? They're just following this rule set down by the DMCA:
the transmitting entity does not cause to be published, or induce or facilitate the publication, by means of an advance program schedule or prior announcement, the titles of the specific sound recordings to be transmitted, the phonorecords embodying such sound recordings, or, other than for illustrative purposes, the names of the featured recording artists, except that this clause does not disqualify a transmitting entity that makes a prior announcement that a particular artist will be featured within an unspecified future time period....`(iii) the transmission...(IV)is not part of an identifiable program in which performances of sound recordings are rendered in a predetermined order.
The idea is to keep you from waiting with your tape recorder, ready to "steal" the next Limp Bizkit tune. It's working pretty well, huh?
What makes CARP news is that the central regulatory body here — the Copyright Office — is finally making decisions about what happens with copyrighted music on the Net. In other words, we're going to start seeing exactly what obstacles the Net will have to route around after the dust settles, if it ever does. This, of course, is a siren call to the Linux community.
We have some interesting models to observe here. The first commercial radio station ever to broadcast on the Web was KPIG in Freedom (no kidding), California. On the air, KPIG is a small potato — although a popular one in its local coverage area, which runs from Santa Cruz to Monterey. On the Web, however, KPIG is a virtual Idaho. Its 128kb MP3 stream is one of the Web's hi-fi music beacons. So are the half dozen or so other streams the station puts out at various speeds for various clients and bandwidths (and with content other than KPIG alone). Naturally (their site reports) they digitize that content on a Linux PC with an open source LAME MP3 encoder.
KPIG, which once described its format as "mutant cowboy rock & roll", is one of the few remaining commercial stations where the disc jockeys still choose the music and community ties are so close it's hard to tell where the station ends and its constituency begins. As a successful business (it has always done pretty well in the ratings and sells plenty of advertising) KPIG has also managed to remain both artist- and industry-friendly. Every song the station plays is listed live on the Web, along with links that make it easy to buy the CD, research the artist, or follow a tour schedule. Without a doubt, KPIG owns the high-mud mark for combining commercial success, community involvement, resourceful use of free and open source software, and adaptiveness to a surreally perverse environment.
One example. Last Spring, when the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA) worked up a dumb new deal for voice-over talent that granted a 300% pay premium for ads played over the Net, over 2500 live streams from commercial radio stations were shut down by owners who didn't want the hassle. KPIG instead came up with a system that automatically runs music, announcements and other "content" in the Web stream while AFTRA-talented ads run on the station's local airwaves. In other words, KPIG brought the unintended consequences of AFTRA's greedy move to a full ironic boil.
The hacker-in-chief at KPIG is "Wild Bill" Goldsmith, one of KPIG's Founding Farmers and the proprietor of RadioParadise.com. Unencumbered by the need to participate in the fully-regulated environment of commercial broadcasting, RadioParadise is beating a path through the uncharted wilderness where artists and technically smart connoisseurs will rebuild their own industry from the outside in. Asked for the technical angle on Radio Paradise, Bill writes:
It's based on a set of software tools - for picking & scheduling music & doing voice tracks from anywhere over the Net, and for accepting & organizing listener feedback on my playlist. Everything I'm doing software-wise is 100% open-source: Linux, PHP, Perl, Postgres, & Icecast.
I am convinced that what you see at www.radioparadise.com represents the future of radio, or of quality radio, anyway: very interactive, tightly controlled artistically (no random segues, everything happens for a reason) - completely free from the influences of the radio/music industry hype machine (to the best of my ability, anyway) - and supported primarily by voluntary contributions from listeners.
This isn't a game plan that's going to make anyone rich. But it can make it possible for anyone with talent to make a very comfortable living without compromizing their integrity in any way - and that's all I for one have ever wanted.
I'm an old radio freak, and have been a fan of KPIG and its ancestors going back to the Sixties. Lving, breathing radio stations like KPIG, run by people who love the business more for the good it does than for the money it makes, have gone out like candles in the rain; first one by one, then by the dozens and finally by the thousands.
It's not surprising to find a hacker starting a bonfire with the last candle that stands.
Some links: