The Marmot’s Hole

3 Comments

1. dogbertt
   Posted April 20, 2007 at 8:49 am | Permalink

   This is awful news. Not sure if it will help, but those interested can check it out:

   “Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

   I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

   In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

   Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio: http://capwiz.com/saveinternet.....id=9631541

   Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends - the more petitioners we can get, the better.

   Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.

   I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition - it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

   As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.”

2. Brendon Carr
   Posted April 20, 2007 at 10:14 am | Permalink

   It doesn’t matter anyway — Korea does not enforce its intellectual-property laws (at least not its Copyright Act) on behalf of foreign rights-holders, and just barely on behalf of domestic rights-holders. So the royalty could spike to $1 billion per play, and compliance would still cost the Korean net-caster zero. Unless you’re a foreign net-caster resident in Korea. Then, watch out. This country’s authorities quite gleefully enforce against foreigners all the laws that are so widely disregarded by the natives.

3. caliboy888
   Posted April 22, 2007 at 1:49 am | Permalink

   There have been some changes over the years though. I remember back around 2004, I could stream full versions of pretty much anything I wanted on Bugs Music for free. I was accessing it from the US and even though I couldn’t read Korean the site wasn’t too hard to navigate. But now everything requires a registration after they got pressure from rights holders in Korea. I understand the point that the Korean govt. doesn’t care too much about foreign IP holders, but those sites seem to have restricted access to foreign music as well.