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Sunday, June 23, 2002
Bet on the whiff 
| | Steven Levy's The Big Secret is about Microsoft's Palladium: a DRM (Digital Rights Management) scheme that I'm guessing is exactly what Hollywood wants. The rub: |
| | Because its ultimate success depends on ubiquity, Palladium is either going to be a home run or a mortifying whiff. ³We have to ship 100 million of these before it really makes a difference,² says Microsoft vice president Will Poole. That¹s why the company can¹t do it without heavyweight partners. Chipmakers Intel and Advanced Micro Devices have signed on to produce special security chips that are integral to the system. ³It¹s a groundswell change,² says AMD¹s Geoffrey Strongin. ³A whole new class of processors not differentiated by speed, but security.² The next step is getting the likes of Dell, HP and IBM to remake their PCs to accommodate the system. |
| | Let's hope they have the sense to say no. |
What was the name of that tea company anyway?
| | Most people value order over diversity. They want choices - or at least think they do - but they want choices presented on a nice easy menu and they don't want to be presented with any choices that will require them to have to actually think about making their choice. They will be happy to pay for this lack of diversity and the corporations are happy to sell it to them. Perhaps Internet radio will thrive outside the U.S. but I look for the control freaks in this country to do everything in their power to influence what goes on in other countries or to limit access somehow. They're not going to give up until they control the whole world. |
| | I don't buy it. If that were the case we'd never have built the Net in the first place. Incumbency has its advantages, but they're not absolute. "The corporations" in this case — and in most, I suspect — aren't that smart, or even that competent. What we call "consumerism" is really just a producerism that enjoyed unusual advantages while the demand sides of market relationships were largely disempowered. The Net changes that. After a two-century hiatus, the Age of Enlightenment picks up where it left off when Industry won the Industrial Revolution. We're in the Information Revolution now, and The People have a shitload more power, especially to inform themselves and each other. |
| | Every so often the country needs a tea party. It's time for another one. |
Talk about buzz
| | If you read the LA Times on paper (as I do) or on line (as the LAT does its best to prevent through a registration process that insists you answer questions about your income, among other intrusive things), you might run across Tim Rutten's To Err Is Human, but to Think Out Loud..., which contains this out-loud thinking about blogging: |
| | Now, just to demonstrate that folly is constant from medium to medium, consider another of this week's examples--the blogger Mickey Kaus. |
| | Bloggers, in case you have been spending the irreplaceable moments of your one and only life reading serious newspapers and good books, are people who maintain Internet logs of their personal analysis and reflections. It's sort of old wine in new skins, since the bloggers are basically a narcissistic throwback to an easily recognizable American type, the 19th century cranks who turned out mountains of self-published pamphlets. |
| | The cranks had all sorts of idiosyncratic preoccupations--single tax schemes, silver-backed currency, vegetarianism and the metaphysical benefits of healthy bowels, for example. Bloggers tend to dabble in politics, media and vendetta. |
| | Wednesday, for instance, Kaus posted an item... |
| | Woops! Wrong bat, wrong hornet's nest. |
One solution
| | Kevin Marks: So how about the radio station sending just an id defining the song to play - a CDDB id would work fine. If the client on my end knows I have it, it plays the local copy; only if I don't have it locally does it tune in to the radio station to stream it. |
| | I think it wouldn't be radio, exactly. Also that it would preclude the old-fashioned radio art of talking over parts of a tune. |
| | Still, an idea. We need those. |
And all is right with the 'sphere
| | Dave's back! Fuckin' D! We missed ya bad, big guy. Welcome home. |
Time for representation
| | The DMCA, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) and now the Librarian of Congress (LOC) all want to tax the playing of records on Internet radio. And they want to make those taxes so high, and so punishing, that nobody currently occupying the territory can survive there. |
| | When you look at it carefully, there really isn't any other way to make sense of a new regulatory and fee structure that is not only unsupportable by any existing business model or technology, but also without precedent or analogue in licensed broadcasting over AM and FM airwaves. |
| | These new taxes are imposed on business processes that (I'm not kidding here, they actually say this) "would have been negotiated in the marketplace between a willing buyer and a willing seller." ...would have been...??? What the fuck kind of rationalization is that? Here's a translation: |
| | Since DMCA, the CARP and the Librarian of Congress choose to characterize pieces of music transmitted over the Internet as a "performances" (which they are not) rather than as broadcasts (which they are), they characterize the Internet as a venue rather than as a medium (much less a commons) and pay-for-play as the only possible business model (between a "willing buyer and a willing seller," remember) in that venue. Then they set about imposing a regulatory and tax burden on that business. Never mind that the pay-for-play business model right now can't exist, because the Internet as it is currently built can't support it. |
| | The effect is to outlaw the internet as a broadcast medium, and to turn the creative commons into a place where all pre-recorded "performances" must be commercial ones (pay for play) in which the only means by which performers get paid is via a tax, with revenues to be distributed by the RIAA. |
| | As I pointed out a couple days ago, a station playing 18 songs for an average of 2000 listeners per hour now faces CARP fees — i.e. taxes — of more than $220,000 per year. Most of these stations currently have revenues of $0. But even stations making some kind of money (mostly by voluntary payments from listeners — the only working business model discovered so far by pioneers in the category) are getting about $3,000 per month, or $36,000 per year. So what we're talking about here aren't merely fees, they're in a whole 'nuther class. They're fines. Oh, and they're retroactive, too: all the way back to 1996. |
| | So the effect is not only to drive webcasting natives off the land they developed, but to punish them — severely — for having occupied it in the first place. |
| | Bear in mind that over-the-air broadcasters currently pay nothing for playing records, other than BMI/ASCAP/SESAC fees based on ratings and revenues, and which go to composers, not performing artists. Those fees are a fraction of the entirely new fees that CARP/LOC imposes on webcasters alone — not broadcasters. And they involve few of the record-keeping burdens that CARP requires and the LOC left standing. For a look at those (and a detailed visit to many of the other issues here), read Jamie Zawinski's brilliant Webcasting Legally piece. Here's how Jamie runs down the list of crap that CARP requires webcasters to keep track of, 24/7/365: |
| | - The name of the service;
- The channel of the program (AM/FM stations use station ID);
- The type of program (archived/looped/live);
- Date of transmission;
- Time of transmission;
- Time zone of origination of transmission;
- Numeric designation of the place of the sound recording within the program;
- Duration of transmission (to nearest second);
- Sound recording title;
- The ISRC code of the recording;
- 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;
- Featured recording artist;
- Retail album title;
- The recording label;
- The UPC code of the retail album;
- The catalog number;
- The copyright owner information;
- The musical genre of the channel or program (station format);
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| | In addition, webcasters must report information on the audience as well: |
| | - The name of the service or entity;
- The channel or program;
- The date and time that the user logged in (the user's timezone);
- The date and time that the user logged out (the user's timezone);
- The time zone where the signal was received (user);
- Unique user identifier;
- The country in which the user received the transmissions.
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| | The closest any webcaster has come to doing any of this shit is what Bill Goldsmith has put together, mosty using cost-free software and tools, at KPIG, Radio Paradise and SmoothJazz. Note that all three stations list what they're playing right now (KPIG and RP list what they've played, going back a looong way), and offer ways for listeners to buy each CD. By the way, that business grace is not among the requirements listed above. The fact that stations point to sites that sell CDs speaks of the good faith relationship these stations extend both to recording artists and to the corrupt, media-murdering industry that represents those artists. |
| | Ah... I notice Bill has posted his response to this insanity on Radio Paradise. It's a good last word on the subject: |
| | Well, another decision has come down regarding web radio royalty rates. Unfortunately, the final rates are still impossibly high. I'm working with other webcasters to try to get Congress to intervene and impose a little fairness and sanity on this issue, and I'm confident that we will prevail. I have no intention of shutting RP down. |
| | There's a man with balls. Let's help him keep them in — and on — the air. |
| | [By the way, this is the last I'm writing on this topic until I finish putting it in a coherent all-in-one Linux Journal piece that I hope will appear on Monday. Stay tuned] |
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