The crap in CARP

So far the webcasting business consists almost entirely of

• The webcast is not limited to particular users who pay for it (that's the ``non-subscription'' part.)
• The user must not be able to choose and receive a particular recording: that is, no playing songs on demand.
• In a three hour period, you can't play more than three tracks from a given album, and no more than two consecutively.
• In a three hour period, you can't play more than four tracks by a given artist, and no more than three consecutively.
• If the webcast is archived, the archive must be at least five hours long, and must not be made available for more than two weeks. The idea here is to make it hard for users to scan through the webcast to pick out and save individual songs.
• If the webcast repeats itself (plays in a loop) then the loop must be at least three hours long.
• The webcast must not publish prior announcements of the songs: you can't let the users know what songs are coming up next, and you can't publish your playlists ahead of time.
• You must identify the song title, album title, and the featured artist in text during the performance of the song.
• You must not ``encourage'' users to copy or record the music that you are playing, and you must ``disable copying by users if in possession of technology capable of doing so.''

So, if you qualify for a compulsory ENT license, you can just pay ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC some fixed rate. Which leads us to...

Paying for the Publishing Rights:

To get a license for the recordings a little trickier, because they haven't quite finished making up the rules yet. The way it will likely end up working is, you will pay RIAA in the same sort of way that you pay ASCAP (with a compulsory license), and RIAA will distribute the money to the copyright holders of the recordings (the record labels.) Remember, you have to pay these guys as well because they have decided that broadcasting over the web is more like printing CDs than it is like broadcasting over the radio waves.

However, this is all still up in the air. Recently (in February 2002) the U.S. Copyright Office (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel, or ``CARP'') released its proposal for how webcasters should be charged by the music industry. You can read about it on the Library of Congress web site. As I understand it, this (or something very like it) will become law in May or June.

The CARP proposal mandates that webcasters must pay 1/7th of a cent ($0.0014) per song, per listener. That means that a webcast that had an average of 100 simultanious listeners would be expected to pay roughly $18,000 per year.

Under these rules, if a webcast had only a single listener -- the webcaster -- they would be expected to pay $184/year for streaming music to themselves! This enormously high rate was a ``compromise'': the RIAA was asking for an even larger cut.

Expect all college-radio-station-based webcasts to disappear once this becomes law: no college broadcasting program has the kind of budget needed to pay for this.

Oh, and there are also apparently some egregious reporting requirements that will be impossible for anyone to actually comply with: for example, not only do they want a ``unique user identifier'' for each listener, they also want the UPC code from the CD the song came from! The complete list of information that they demand be reported:

1. The name of the service;
2. The channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID);
3. The type of program (archived/looped/live);
4. Date of transmission;
5. Time of transmission;
6. Time zone of origination of transmission;
7. Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program;
8. Duration of transmission (to nearest second);
9. Sound recording title;
10. The ISRC code of the recording;
11. The release year of the album per copyright notice and in the case of compilation albums, the release year of the album and copyright date of the track;
12. Featured recording artist;
13. Retail album title;
14. The recording label;
15. The UPC code of the retail album;
16. The catalog number;
17. The copyright owner information;
18. The musical genre of the channel or program (station format);

In addition, webcasters must report information on the audience as well:

1. The name of the service or entity;
2. The channel or program;
3. The date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone);
4. The date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone);
5. The time zone where the signal was received (user);
6. Unique user identifier;
7. The country in which the user received the transmissions.