Friday, June 21, 2002

P2P Prophetry

First, Jonathan Peterson gets the Prophet Award for correctly predicting, one month ago, when the Librarian of Congress gave the appearance of rejecting CARP in toto, that the Librarian would roll under political pressure and do the wrong thing after all:

I wouldn't be breaking out the champagne just yet. You can damn well bet that RIAA and the labels are already filling up Congresscritter appointment books to apply some pressure.

He fucking nailed it.

Second, Jonathan has some very encouraging things to say (not about Internet radio, which remains on death row, but about the next thing) in today's latest post, Internet Radio is Dead, Long Live Peercast. Read it and hope.

Meanwhile, there is still much you can do to challenge the execution of Internet radio. For details, visit WCPE's page on the subject.

Back among the Dead Stations Walking, SomaFM is already gone. But the rest seem to be holding on. I take this as a good sign.

Okay, am I doing this math right?

Okay, the CARP/LOC royalty rate structure is in the this table here.

Over in Kuro5hin, there's a piece called RIAA kills US-based Internet radio that says a station with around 2000 concurrent listeners per day will pay a fee of $500/day.

Not sure how they came up with that, but the way I read the CARP/LOC table, a station with 2000 listeners playing 18 songs in an hour, at 0.07¢ ($0.0007) per song per listener per hour, woud pay $604.80 per day, or $220,903.20 per year.

The math:

18 x $.0007 = $.0126 per listener/hour

$.0126 x 2000 = $25.20 for 2000 listeners in an hour

$.31752 x 24 = $604.80 per day

$2.419655 x 365.25 = $220,903.20 per year

Correct or no?

[Later...] Howard Greenstein says yes. More on his blog: Oh CARP, Congress just killed Internet radio. Context: when I first met Howard, back in '96, he was running one of the first-ever set of Internet radio stations. On this topic, he's been there, done lots of it, and has a dresser full of t-shirts.

Looking for tools

Is there a scrolling/printing calculator (one that shows all the lines you've recently entered, like an old adding machine) for OS X yet? How about for Linux? Would be handy.

[Later...] Danke schön to Frank Koehntopp for pointing to this calculator here, which I just used to re-do the (now corrected) math in the post above.

Ah well

The USA played a good game, but went down, 1-0. Bummer.

On the air but off the pipes

RW Online: NAB doesn't think too much of the streaming royalties set by the Librarian of Congress. In a statement, NAB President/CEO Eddie Fritts said: "The Librarian's decision places a prohibitive financial burden on radio station streaming, and will likely result in the termination of this fledgling service to listeners. It also perpetuates the hoax that the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel process reflects marketplace reality."

This makes a point lost in other remarks about the latest decision: it isn't just Internet-only stations that get killed off. It's streams by terrestrial commercial stations too.

Commercial broadcasting is notoriously flinty about killing off every possible expense. This new ruling adds an easily cut overhead burden on those stations. I'll be amazed if they don't kill their streams en masse.

Thanks to Mary Lu for the link.

SB Rulez

The Times endorses Santa Barbara.

K5 lives

Paul Boutin in Wired News: It takes a village to save a site.

Congrats to Rusty and the whole K5 community for. Well done.

Now it's up to the Yanks

Damn. Brazil, 2-1.

I really thought the game was going to go England's way after Owen scored that first goal. But after Seaman took that hard fall it seemed like a different game. The guy who hadn't yielded a goal in over 300 minutes (up to this game) let the winning free kick get past him.

Now I've got to get a few hours sleep and some work done before the U.S.-Germany game begins.

Pouring it on

Kurt Hansen at RAIN has a long take on the latest CARP business. Late flash: Congressmen Jay Inslee and Rich Boucher say they will consider legislation to change the baseless "willing buyer/willing seller" nonsense that guided both CARP and the Librarian of Congress to insane conclusions.

Here's Save Our Streams, the authoritative source on the matter from Rice University.

Nice to see Andrew Orlowski of the Register agreeing with my take on this thing. Same with SaveInternetRadio.org, whose only headline says it all: Internet radio now in SERIOUS jeopardy

Unrelated... I'm sure Andrew and I are both up late here on t West Coast, pulling for England right now. (Halftime, score tied at 1-1... ouch! It's now 2-1 Brazil).

Turn up the heat

It's the Summer Solstice. You know what to do.