On Monday, July 30, the U.S. Copyright Office convened the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (yes, CARP) <http://www.loc.gov/copyright/carp/> to make a decision shortly on 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 in his weblog:
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). What's more, many of these are far more interactive than traditional broadcasting has never been, or can even comprehend. What's the news for them? Easy: work outside the system.
That's what KPIG has been doing since it became the first commercial radio station ever to broadcast on the Web. KPIG, which broadcasts from (no kidding) Freedom, California on 107-oink-5 on the FM band, also puts out a raft of Web streams, including a 128kb MP3 channel that's a hi-fi beacon on the Net. They do it with a LAME <http://www.mp3dev.org/mp3/> open source MP3 encoder and digitize it with a Linux box.
The hacker-in-cheif at KPIG is one of its founders, "Wild Bill" Goldsmith, who is also the proprietor of RadioParadise.com. Bill writes:
(Radio Paradise is) 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.
Or, as Scoop Nisker famously said, "If you don't like the news, go out and make some of your own."