As seen on soma.fm
The Copyright Royalty Board has announced new copyright licensing fees for internet radio stations. The new fees are a staggering increase over our previous annual royalty rate of about $22,000 to over $600,000 for 2006. And the fees are even higher in 2007, based on our current listenership, they’ll be over $1 million dollars for 2007! (Which is 3-4 times what we hope to raise in 2007). If you think this is unfair to internet radio, and you are an American citizen, you can send a letter to your congressman showing your support for internet radio. We already have the attention of Congress, so now you have to let them know you support internet radio and that royalty rates shouldn’t be structured in a way that will put small webcasters our of business
We need to raise at least $15,000 each month to meet our current minimum operating budget. (The new royalty rates will substantially increase our costs!) With your $50 support, you’ll get a SomaFM Tshirt, or at the $35 support level get our Indie Pop Rocks! compilation CD. Or get both for $75! And if that’s more than you can budget right now, your support of any amount helps us!
Chrissy is a PowerShell MVP who has worked in IT for nearly 20 years, and currently serves as a Sr. Database Engineer in Belgium. Always an avid scripter, she attended the Monad session at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles back in 2005 and has worked and played with PowerShell ever since. Chrissy is currently pursuing an MS in Systems Engineering at Regis University and helps maintain RealCajunRecipes.com in her spare time. She holds a number of certifications, including those relating to SQL Server, SuSE Linux, SharePoint and network security. She recently became co-lead of the SQL PASS PowerShell Virtual Chapter. You can follow her on Twitter at @cl.
I heard about this, but i can’t find it on their site.
/me searches some more
… Oh it’s on their blog: the motive for killing webcasting
BTW PostgreSQL rocks.
I thought you might be interested in this, given your coverage of online radio.
The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) just released a report on Internet Radio and Copyright Royalties at an event on Capitol Hill on May 10. In the report, we describe problems with the current copyright royalty system for Internet Radio, and what steps Congress should take to reform this system. Specifically, we say that Congress should grant the same performance copyright to all broadcast technologies; modify the statutory license to allow copyright owners to specific separate rates for each sound recording; and allow copyright owners to assign separate rates to small and non-commercial webcasters.
The report is available on our website at – http://www.itif.org/files/InternetRadio.pdf