The Golden Rule: The Conspiracy to Kill Internet Radio
Once again, in Washington, those with the gold are making the rules to benefit themselves at our expense
by Lee H Goldberg

What do Internet broadcasters and wind power enthusiasts have in common? It turns out a whole lot more than you'd imagine. For one thing, both technologies have the potential to improve our lives and become the basis of new industries that could help energize our economy. They are also quite disruptive and could undermine existing industries which have become quite cozy with their current quasi-monopoly status. That's why both Internet radio and the wind power industry are under assault by stupid, shortsighted regulations (bought and paid for by the very industries they threaten) that are specifically designed to cripple them.

Most of you are already familiar with it, so I won't bore you with a long lecture on the virtues of Internet Radio. But as I said in a 2004 editorial, "It's allowed me to turn off the homogenized audio pap that passes for broadcasting these days and fill my time at the computer with music from lower-power independent college stations such as WPRB, WXPN, and the eccentric, unpolished, and endearing community radio phenomenon known as WDVR."

Unfortunately, the diversity offered by small radio stations and Internet radio consolidators like Live365 has invoked the wrath of the major record labels and large media conglomerates like Clear Channel which rely on near-monopolies to drive their lowest-common-denominator sonic drivel out to the greatest number of passive listeners.

This is probably why the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), which oversees sound recording royalties paid by Internet radio services, suddenly increased Internet radio's royalty burden between 300% and 1200%, levying fees that don't exist for terrestrial radio stations. They did this by using legal sleight-of-hand to classify Internet and satellite radio transmissions as performances, which subjects them to a much higher fee structure than regular radio stations pay. This ignores the long-standing precedent that allowed terrestrial radio to pay the more reasonable composer royalties to songwriters and music publishers because of the value of the exposure they provided.

I'm not sure what obscure branch of logic led the CRB to conclude that the exposure to listeners receiving their music via IP packets is any less valuable than reaching the same ears via radio waves, but it's probably the same reasoning that enabled Ronald Reagan to declare ketchup a vegetable in order to justify funding cuts to school lunch programs for underprivileged grade-schoolers.

This sudden, seemingly-arbitrary increase seems all the more strange because Internet radio already pays its fair share, kicking in twice the royalty rates that satellite radio broadcasters do. That's why I suspect that the proposed fee structure is the result of undue influence of the SoundExchange, a so-called nonprofit organization that collects royalties for artists and record labels that happens to have been created by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Given the RIAA's past history of draconian fees, monopolistic practices and pay-for-play copyright legislation, it looks to me like SoundExchange is simply a tool being used to manipulate the Federal Government's regulatory arm into killing off its competition by proxy. If you want more details bout this cozy arrangement, check out a rather insightful article recently published on DailyKos.

If this pisses you off as much as it does me, there are several ways to take some easy and direct action. First, educate yourself a bit on the subject by either doing a web search on <SoundExchange RIAA> and <Internet radio royalties>, or scanning a few of the articles posted on the Save Internet Radio web site. Once you're armed with the facts, contact your legislators and ask them to support house bill HR 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, and Senate bill S. 1353. You can find other actions to take at either the Live365 web site or at Save Internet Radio.

I've already gone on too long about this so I won't go into details about the weird wind power legislation that Nick Rahall, a congressman from West Virginia (the coal capital of the East Coast) has just introduced. For the moment I'll just say, that if passed, his bill would subject both industrial and residential wind power installations to such excessive levels of regulation and red tape that it would most likely drive most of the industry out of business. If you're interested, you can learn most of the details from a recent press release from the American Wind Energy Association. It's also interesting to note that Representative Rahall's neighbor from Virginia (another coal state), Senator Warner, tried something similar a year ago by jiggering some homeland security appropriations legislation  that put all new wind turbine projects on hold pending a lengthy and unnecessary review, supposedly for potential interference with defense radar. In both cases, it appears that Big Coal interests have bought and paid for legislation that was designed to set back one of the technologies that holds the biggest promise to both strengthen our economy and improve the environment.

Comments? Questions? Suggestions for actions we can take to save wind power or Internet radio? Write me at: lhg at en-genius.net.