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Thursday, June 20, 2002
Stay lifted on execution of Internet radio. 
| | That's my take on this. What a fucking bummer. |
| | This is an absolute fuck-you to internet radio, to listeners, to everybody but the record industry. And frankly, it fucks them too. They're trying to extract money from a business that doesn't exist, and denying countless new artists and songs the only place they have access to airplay. Amazing. |
| | Kevin Marks: So, the basic structure still stands, the webcasters are still charged huge back royalties,and they still don't have the freedom to offer interactive programming in any meaningful way. The logic of record companies of paying thousands to get airplay on the radio, but trying extract thousands for wireplay on the net escapes me still. |
| | B!X shows how it's playing in the mainstream press. Incredibly they're playing it as a "victory" for webcasters because the royalty rate will only be half what the CARP panel originally proposed. But they're still high for most stations, and the reporting requirements, which presumably remain, are labyrinthine and prohibitive. And the technology for keeping those records, of course, doesn't exist. |
| | Make no mistake. This is a death sentence. It's a march off the land these stations alone pioneered and developed. It paves the ecosystem. |
| | Here's what I want to know... What happened between the rejection of CARP a month ago, and it's approval with minor modifications today? |
| | The answer seems to be that the Librarian of Congress is off in the same psychotic territory as the CARP when it contemplates the existence of a market where there is none: |
| | On the recommendation of the Register of Copyrights, the Librarian rejected the CARP¹s determination because significant portions of it were arbitrary or contrary to law. Where the Librarian could not accept the CARP¹s recommendations, he has adopted rates and terms that are justified based on the evidence presented in the CARP proceeding and the requirements of the law. Otherwise, he has adopted the CARP¹s reasoning and recommendations. |
| | The Librarian is required to accept the CARP¹s determination unless he concludes that the determination is arbitrary or contrary to the applicable provisions of the copyright law. When aspects of the CARP¹s determination are found to be arbitrary or contrary to law, the Librarian may substitute his own judgment for that of the CARP, but he will still give deference to those aspects of the CARP¹s determination which were not arbitrary or contrary to law. Applying those principles, the Librarian accepted the CARP¹s conclusion that the RIAA/Yahoo! agreement represented the best evidence of what rates would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller for a license to engage in webcasting of radio retransmissions and Internet-only transmissions. |
| | The Librarian also accepted much of the CARP¹s analysis of how the RIAA/Yahoo! agreement demonstrated the marketplace rate for webcasting rates. |
| | I boldfaced that passage because it represents absolutely specious and wishful thinking on the part of both the record industry and Yahoo, which bought its way into the nonexistent webcasting business by paying $6 billion for Mark Cuban's Broadcast.com and later needed to rationalize the expense. |
| | There may well be a business here in the long run. Listeners pay Bill Goldsmith and RadioParadise for something. I 'm sure Bill would be glad to pay artists some piece of what he gets for playing their records. Composers too. There is enormous intention of good faith toward artists on the part of native webcasters. |
| | But most of those webcasters never got to sit at the CARP table. They were not party to this treaty. They were never wanted. They were always in the way. |
| | By reconceiving broadcasts as "performances" (which they quite obviously are not, no matter how 'perfect' the reproduction may be, which it never is), these co-conspirators (CARP, the RIAA, Yahoo and the Librarian of Congress) effectively clear the landscape of its natural inhabitants and replace it with a whole new business that doesn't exist yet: the public performance business that Hollywood and the record industry feared back in the earliest and wackiest days of the late dot-com boom. |
| | The conspirators no longer fear that business. They just want to continue pretending it will some day exist. They get the upside either way. If it never exists a whole class of bothersome, unregulated and uncontrolled threats is marched out of the way. If it does exist, they've got the land for themselves. |
A maze ing
Do the polymath
| | Eric Raymond offers a couple of strong history lessons on Islam, al-Qaeda. |
Passing the clue-by-four
| | By the way, I've seen the automated e-response that goes out to those who write in to protest NPR's profanely clueless link permission form. It's actually worse than you'd expect. Boggles the mind. |
| | Hate to say it, but I rely less and less on NPR as a source of information. Same goes for the rest of radio and television. Yeah, for news and features, NPR still beats beat the shit out of everything else on the radio bands; but so what? There's not much else on the information side of noncommercial radio, and commercial radio is an army of corrupt clones. TV is worse. Yesterday I kept tuning in to various forms of ESPN, hoping to get some kind of football (soccer variety) news. There was nothing. Nada. Meanwhile, the U.S. is in the World Cup Quarterfinals. Every sports news organization outside the U.S. devotes 10x more attention to the surprising American team than does ESPN or any of the shows on sports talk radio. It's sad. |
| | But there's news aplenty about the World Cup (and everything else you can name) on the Web, so fuck 'em all. |
If he only knew
| | The thread started here and continues here. |
Needing my Daily Dave
| | I hope the big guy hurries up and gets over whatever it is, because we miss his ass, bad. |
Frontiers of caffienation
| | I'm the happy user of an 802.11b wireless internet connection between my office, and the surrounding street. As a writer, with no need to be anywhere but at the end of an internet connection, an email address and a mobile phone number, it's a revolutionary step. |
| | But the wondrous convenience of writing in a place designed to bring me regular blasts of caffeine is really nothing compared to the serendipitous meetings it has created: for as the network I set up is free for all to use, and somewhat advertised on the web, this cafe has seen a steady stream of like-minded technology enthusiasts, bloggers, and geared-up layabouts united in the joyous realisation that they never need go to the office again. A correctly enabled laptop, and a coffee addiction later, your first delivery of email over a community wireless network seems to come with angelic music and a parting of the clouds. |
| | There's a pile of related stories behind the "In this section" links as well. |
| | By the way, The Guardian Unlimited Weblog is possibly the best one-stop news portal anywhere. They also have a "best weblogs" subhead over text that says Do you have a weblog? If you do, please email us about it. We want to know if a large number of our readers keep a weblog - and if we can improve our service by linking to the best of them, or the best parts of them. That email address again: weblog@guardianunlimited.co.uk. |
| | Bracket that against NPR's contemptible linking form and you've defined the termini of the continuum of news organization cluefulness about the Web. |
From the alter country
Say who?
| | Ever heard of a "byline strike" before? Me either. But that's what they've got going at the Providence Journal and the Washington Post, Sheila Lennon explains, More here and here. Who knew? |
| | Not something you tend to read about in the paper, is it? |
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