TheBuzz
TheBuzz
CRAIG T. KOJIMA / CKOJIMA@STARBULLETIN.COM
Kailua webcaster Robert Abbett is fighting against new rules that require Internet radio sites such as his to pay royalties for each song they transmit. The fees will put webcasting sites out of business, Abbett says.
Webcasting royalties
threaten to skin
Kailua RabbettNobody is happy with the long-awaited decision on Internet performance royalties from Librarian of Congress James H. Billington.
Not webcasters, not the Recording Industry Association of America which would collect the fees and not the American Federation of Musicians or the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, members of which would receive a portion of the fees collected.
At issue are payments to be demanded of webcasters, or those who stream music for an audience via the Internet. They include huge so-called "aggregators" such as Yahoo!, to radio stations which stream on-air programming over the Web and small, one-man operations.
The latter see the fees as exorbitant and certain to put them out of business.
Local webcaster Robert "Rabbett" Abbett doesn't want to think about his last day.
"We're not going away," he said. "We're going to fight."
Abbett founded his music-streaming Internet Radio Hawaii site at www.irh.com in 1995. It is listener-supported and is now self-sustaining, he said.
"Four of my five computers were donated by listeners. The iPods I use as a backup were donated by a listener. A second microphone was donated by a listener. It's as much theirs as it is mine," he said.
A day job as an estimator and salesman with Custom Contractors Inc. sustains Abbett and his family in Kailua.
The thousands of webcasters now in business must be recognized as small businesses, he said. He and others plan to band together to use the judicial and legislative systems to fight back.
Abbett doesn't blame the librarian of Congress.
"He was doing the best job he could within the rules laid out for him," he said. No small webcasters were represented when the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel was developing the rate structure, he said.
The recording industry and entities representing performing artists see the rate structure as insufficient.
"Artists and record labels will subsidize the webcasting businesses of multi-billion dollar companies like Yahoo, AOL, RealNetworks and Viacom," RIAA President Cary Sherman said in a statement last week.
RadioInk.com reported Friday that both the musicians' and television and radio artists' organizations expressed concern that the webcasting rate fails to fairly compensate recording artists.
Details explaining the fees can be found on the webcasting rates link on the Library of Congress home page at LOC.gov. In general, the payments range from 2 cents to 7 cents a song for stations, or $10,000 and 10 percent of revenues for other types of businesses.
Radio stations, webcasters and commercial establishments already pay music publishers' royalties to licensing agencies.
Radio stations do not pay RIAA royalties for airplay as an agreement dating back some 70 years established that radio airplay encourages record sales.
Abbett and others believe music streaming also spurs record sales, citing correspondence from a Florida listener who purchases up to $500 worth of Hawaiian music during visits to the islands.
Web sites such as Abbett's play the music as well as display album covers and offer links to artists' sites as well as sites which sell music.
"Play equals promotion equals sales," Abbett said. "The basic gist is we are not being afforded the same equality and rights to play and promote music like our conventional radio brothers."
Abbett and his webcasting brethren see the basic premise for rate collection as flawed.
In 1998 as congress was drafting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act it was believed that "anything on the Internet would be a perfect digital copy of a CD, but as we all know, little musical streams are not perfect digital copies," Abbett said.
The loss of sound quality is akin to the quality lost in copying a copy of a copy of a videotape, for instance.
Abbett said webcasters want several things to occur: for the rate decision to be overturned; recognition of Internet radio as "radio with an Internet delivery system rather than antennae"; elimination of any and all new fees levied on Internet broadcasters; and public involvement in their fight.
Irh.com, SaveInternetRadio.org and other sites are encouraging Web listeners to contact their congressional representatives while RIAA.com presents information opposing the rates and offers links to subscription-based music streaming sites.
Erika Engle is a reporter with the Star-Bulletin.
Call 529-4302, fax 529-4750 or write to Erika Engle,
Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 500 Ala Moana Blvd., No. 7-210,
Honolulu, HI 96813. She can also be reached
at: eengle@starbulletin.com
