May 21 -- The
Librarian of Congress has announced today that he is rejecting
the proposed controversial rates by the CARP, giving hope to
webcasters once more that their world will not be turned upside
down on them.
June 21 -- The
U.S. Copyright Office and the Librarian of Congress officially
announced their decision on the ever-controversial royalty rates
for webcasting music online. The
official fees come in at a rate of .07 cents per song which is
streamed live online and a lower rate of .02 cents per stream
for simulcasted and / or archived broadcasts. There is also an
additional fee to keep copies of the music on the web server
of 8.8 percent of the entire royalty fee, which is tacked on
top of the total cost of the royalty rates. :(
While the rates are half of
that which CARP recommended initially, the finalized official
fee structure still may force a vast majority of independent
webcasters offline. With a additional requirement of payment
of back royalties all the way through 1998, webcasters now have
only 45 days to come up with the payment for webcasting already
done, putting many in a unrealistic position of trying to come
up with absurd amounts of money for a service which they may
not have been charging for to begin with.
June 24 -- Mark
Cuban (now owner of the Dallas Mavericks) speaks out on how the
Broadcast.com deal with the RIAA was designed to to stifle competition.
This deal was the only precedent for which the US Copyright Office
CARP panel recommended the webcasting royalty rates now finalized
by the Librarian of Congress, which are pushing independent webcasters
off-line.
The voluntary royalty deal
between Yahoo! and the RIAA that the Librarian of Congress announced
as his template for the entire industry last week was a deal
crafted by Yahoo! to shut out small webcasters and decrease competition,
Broadcast.com founder and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban revealed.
July 29 -- Artemis
Records has agreed to issue licenses to internet radio for one
year for the master use of songs by all Artemis recording artists.
This announcement was made today by Danny Goldberg, Chairman
and CEO, Artemis Records and Daniel Glass, President, Artemis
Records. During this period, beginning August 1, 2002, Artemis
will waive the royalty payments that would otherwise be due them.
Artemis Records is a New York-based
independent record label with a roster that includes Kittie,
singer/songwriter Steve Earle and rapper Khia, as well as the
critically acclaimed Marah and Josh Joplin Group, Boston, Ricki
Lee Jones, North Mississippi All Stars, and Graham Nash among
others. They are the label for the Dark Angel Soundtrack,
Steal this movie Soundtrack and others.
October 7 -- Last
week a bill was introduced in the house to extend the deadline
for small Webcasters by six months to start paying performance
royalties. Then all of a sudden, with lobbying from both sides,
they said that they could negotiate an agreement by the end of
the week and on Sunday an agreement was reached. A press release
was issued on HR 5469 saying that an agreement had been reached.
Then all of a sudden we're hearing that the agreement was in
trouble and may not get past the artists. What happened?
The agreement that the small
webcasters accepted had the artists being paid directly their
share of the performance royalty, but after the webcasters left,
language was inserted that eliminated direct payments to artists,
allowing the RIAA and SoundExchange to recoup their expenses
before making any payment to artists.
Mitch Glazer added the language
that made the bill unpalatable to the webcasters as well as the
artists.
October 8 -- In
an amazing turnaround, the House Judiciary Committee added the
text back into the bill HR 5469 (Webcasting Royalty Bill) that
sees to it that the artists get paid directly. The bill offers
a lower royalty rate to small commerical webcasters. However
the bill does not apply to college webcasters so there are still
some issues to settle.
October 23 -- WASHINGTON--
In a scramble to end their session, senators have left small
commercial Webcasters with an uncertain--and potentially expensive--future.
Online radio stations and the
recording industry, including the RIAA, had agreed on royalty
rates that would considerably discount what Webcasters are to
pay music companies, but the rates required the approval of Congress.
Both groups expected the Senate to approve the rates late Thursday
night, but 20 minutes before the vote Senator Jesse Helms (R-North
Carolina) put a hold on the bill at the request of small religious
broadcasters in North Carolina.
"Our constituents did
not have full opportunity to participate," says Joe Lanier,
a Helms aide. He says Congress was moving too fast and overlooked
the interests of these Webcasters.
The Librarian of Congress in
June imposed a rate of.07 cents per song per listener. This rate--which
now takes effect on Sunday--is retroactive to the date the Webcasters
started business. Many Webcasters object that the rate is too
high and will force them off the Internet.
At first, members of Congress
drafted a bill to extend the royalty deadline by six months.
That effort was abandoned on October 1 when small commercial
Webcasters and the recording industry said they could reach an
agreement. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner
(R-Wisconsin) gave them a week to strike a deal, and agreement
was reached October 6. Sensenbrenner introduced a bill outlining
the compromise, which creates a sliding fee scale based on revenue
for the next two years. Sensenbrenner's bill passed by a voice
vote in the House last week. The bill's sponsors, the recording
industry, and several Webcasters expected the Senate to approve
the bill by unanimous consent Thursday, three days before the
Librarian of Congress's rates went into effect. Then Helms halted
the process.
Deborah Proctor, general manager
of WCPE, a public radio station in Wake Forest, North Carolina,
also streams its classical music broadcasts over the Internet.
She says her station wanted to be a part of the negotiations.
"Unless you had six digits
to pay for the arbitration process, you couldn't even comment,"
Proctor says.
November 14 -- Las
Vegas, NV (November 14, 2002) - As the lame duck legislative
session begins today, the webcasting community continues the
fight to keep HR 5469 from passing in the Senate and becoming
law.
A year that started with the
webcasting industry united in a common goal to work on the CARP
(Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel) rates and develop reasonable,
equitable legislation as an industry standard has ended with
the entire U.S.-based webcasting community up in arms over a
private deal negotiated between the RIAA and VOW (Voice of Webcasters).
"There is nothing wrong
with a group of individual webcasters sitting down at the table
to negotiate a deal with the RIAA," said Ann Gabriel, President
of Webcaster Alliance and CEO of Las Vegas-based Gabriel Media
Inc. "When a private negotiation ends up being written into
language for a Bill and then forced as a yoke around the neck
of an entire industry which had no say in the matter, there is
something terribly wrong with our legislative process."
The webcasting industry at
large watched in horror as an amended HR 5469 was passed through
the House in early October. When initially introduced in late
September by Congressman James Sensenbrenner, the one-paragraph
Bill called for a 6-month stay in the imposed royalty rates collection
on music broadcast over the Internet. The original version of
5469 was circulated, widely accepted and approved by both webcasters
and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which represents
terrestrial Radio stations.
But before HR 5469 could be
introduced on the House floor, the RIAA yelled foul, brought
in the AFL-CIO to scuttle it and Sensenbrenner pulled it from
the "rules suspension" session. Sensenbrenner then
demanded the RIAA and VOW negotiate a deal. That privately negotiated
deal then became the language of a new HR 5469, which ballooned
into a 30-plus page piece of legislation considered by most in
the webcasting industry to be a legal nightmare.
