Yet another battle has been won on the ongoing war being waged by the recording industry against your rights to use digital music. Internet radio is no more. My wife and I, who used Internet radio heavily, have been tracking the issue for weeks now, right up until the end. Now when we dial up our favorite Internet radio stations, all we get is silence.
Back in the early days of radio (about 1920), amateurs began to broadcast music (and other content) over the airwaves with no regulation at all. Of course, big government stepped right in and rigidly organized broadcast radio. It assigned frequencies and monitored content. And it eventually ensured that royalties were paid by the stations for the copyrighted music that they played. This regulation effectively barred any amateur or non-commercial effort - an amateur just couldn't afford to "buy" a frequency or to pay the royalties involved. And that was the birth of the commercial, which now haunts everything we hear on radio and broadcast TV.
Internet radio started (and still primarily is) an amateur effort. Basically, anybody who wanted to organize a playlist of songs could make that available directly over the Internet. Because the Internet is relatively unregulated, they were able to do this with a fairly free hand. We found a number of people who did this, and played the kind of music we wanted to hear. Because it was all digital, the "signal quality" and audio fidelity were excellent. The term for this is "webcasting". The problem: these "stations" were not paying royalties for the music they played - they would just buy a CD, digitize it (rip it) and play it on their "station".
There was some effort to commercialize this, and in fact some stations did start to air an infrequent commercial. But most people would avoid those stations, as there are very few people that I know of who relish listening to toothpaste ads.
But broadcast radio stations broadcast music all the time. What is the difference? At the bottom of this problem lies the question of what is the allowable use of digital copies of music. I think that it was pretty clear that these stations were making music available but not compensating the owner of the music properly for that use. The question is: how much compensation is appropriate?
Our recording industry perceives that they have lost much revenue because of copying of digital music. But rather than work with the new digital environment to attempt to evolve, they began a very broad and expensive campaign to both shore up their legal rights, and to create new and more restrictive rights.
First to fall was Napster - the Internet file swapping system. Napster was shut down through the courts. The technique used to eliminate Internet radio was more subtle. They convinced the regulating agency (the CARP or Copyright Arbitration Royalty Board) that royalties should be paid by webcasters. The problem is that the per-song, per listener royalty assigned is so high (higher than broadcast radio stations pay), that it effectively has again snuffed out all amateur or non-commercial webcasts.
As a result, almost all of the Internet radio stations have shut themselves down. The issue is still being hotly debated, but for now the webcasters have effectively been prohibited from broadcasting.
I read an excellent column on this by Rob Fixmer (formally of ZDNet). Unfortunately, I can't find an online version of it, so I can't point you to it. But Rob clearly faults the recording industry for pursuing any and all legal avenues to protect its rights, instead of evolving digital music to meet the requirements of the listeners (their customers). As he put it, they were morally right, but the industry turned left.
My prediction now is that there will be a rise of bootleg stations, or stations from other countries. Since these can't be regulated as effectively as they are in the states, the next step after that will be to shut off the Internet at our borders. And then the Internet as we knew it will be no more…
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).