Stop the War Makers. Hands Around the Lab. Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Never Again!
Aug 10, 1:30pm - 3pm, Robert Payne Park, 5800 Patterson Pass Road (at Vasco), Livermore

March for Immigrant Rights
Sep 20, 11am Assemble at Yerba Buena Gardens (Mission St. between 3rd & 4th), San Francisco; 12pm - March up Market St.; 1:30pm - Program & Festival at Civic Center.

Rally and March to Defeat Proposition 54
Sep 25, 12:00noon - Sproul Plaza, UC Berkeley

Reportback from Palestine
Sep 27, 6:30pm - Redwood Gardens Community Room, 2951 Derby Street, Berkeley

End the Occupation! Bring the Troops Home Now!
Sep 28, Noon - Dolores Park, San Francisco - 12pm. Gather at Dolores Park, march to: 2pm - Rally at Civic Center

Forum: Defend Environmntal Justice, Defeat Prop. 54!
Sep 30, 7:00 PM - Ecology Center, 2530 San Pablo Ave., near Dwight Way, Berkeley.

In Celebration of the Free Speech Movement: The Berkeley ACLU Presents Larry Fly
Oct 6, 7:00 PM - Pauley Ballroom West, Berkeley campus

Stop the FTAA and School of the Americas
November 19-23, Miami and Colombus, GA.

Buy Nothing Day
November 28, Everywhere.

War of the Web
By Bill Cassel and Sandra Wasson - KALX

The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.
-Hunter S. Thompson

You see this quote around a lot lately; I got it from KALX's Mike Burma, who has attached it to every email he's sent for the last several months. In true Thompson fashion, it uses hyperbole to express an essential truth.

The music business is a cesspool of greed and corruption. This is a simple fact of life-we see it in the record industry, we see it on MTV, we see it in the concert business, we see it in commercial radio. It's not really worth getting upset about except on that rare occasion when it actually impacts your life.

Unfortunately, one of those rare occasions may be on the horizon. Any day now, KALX could be forced to shut down its audio stream, which has been available on the Internet at kalx.berkeley.edu for the last several years. To understand why, we have to go back a little bit.

The Past
In the beginning, there was radio, and it was good.

Then came deregulation and the rise of corporate ownership, and commercial radio became a vast wasteland. But we were stuck with it, unless we were lucky enough to be within receiving range of KALX or one of its brethren on the left side of the radio dial.

Then the Internet came along, and certain smart people figured out that they could use it to transmit (or "stream") audio all over the world. Some of them set up their own Internet-only "radio stations"; this came to be known as "Webcasting." By removing the constraints of geography and broadcast licensing, Webcasting was able to reach both niche markets and worldwide audiences.

Others, like KALX, used the Internet to simulcast their over-the-air programming so that people outside their transmitting range could listen in. This made it possible for us here in the Bay Area to listen to radio from all over the world, and for people in exotic locations like Kathmandu and Fremont to listen to KALX. It also meant that you wouldn't have to do without your KALX fix when you were on the road.

This was also good. But not everyone was happy. Along with audio streaming, the popularity of the World Wide Web had also given rise to music file-sharing programs like Napster, which made it possible for people to download free music off the Internet. File sharing struck terror into the hearts of many in the music business, not entirely without justification.

It was in this context that Congress passed the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Designed to protect the owners of music copyrights from the ravages of modern technology, the DMCA (among other things) stipulated that anyone who played music on the the Internet should pay a royalty to record companies. This marked a major change from the way things had previously been done in American broadcast radio, where royalties had been paid to music Publishers (who represent songwriters) but not to the owners of music recordings (i.e. record companies).

However, although the DMCA mandated that Internet broadcasters would have to pay such a royalty, it did not specify how much this royalty would be. Congress instructed the U.S. Copyright Office to determine rates and recordkeeping requirements. Then there was a dramatic pause of about four years, during which streaming grew more widespread while the wheels of bureaucracy ground slowly forward.

Early this year, things finally started to happen. On February 20, the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) that had been established by the Copyright Office to decide the issue released its findings. Now it was Webcasters' turn to get nervous. The CARP recommended that Webcasters be made to pay up .14 cents per "performance," with a performance defined as one song heard by one listener. So if in the course of an hour you streamed 15 songs to 200 listeners, you would owe 15 200 .14 cents, or $4.20. Extend that over the course of a day and you get $100.80; over the course of a year and you get $36,792-a lot of money for a small Webcaster, which was likely to be marginally profitable at best. The recommended fees for noncommercial Web simulcasters like KALX were lower, but still significant.

What's more, the CARP recommended that these fees be calculated retroactive to 1998, making some Webcasters liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars-in many cases several times their annual budgets.

Next up was the Librarian of Congress (LoC), who had 90 days to accept or reject the CARP's recommendations. After furious lobbying by both commercial and noncommercial Web-casters, the LoC rejected the CARP proposal. Internet streamers breathed a sigh of relief-but when the final regulations were released on June 20, they felt sick all over again.

Although the fees recommended by the CARP for Webcasters had been cut in half, they were still quite high, especially for commercial Webcasters, who were instructed to pay .07 cents per performance, retroactive to October 1998. The LoC also issued some guidelines for content and recordkeeping; the repercissions of this part of the ruling were not immediately clear. There was another pause while everyone waited to see how the ruling would be implemented and what would happen next.

The Present
So what's happening now? Well, to quote Talking Heads, everything seems to be up in the air at this time.

Since the LoC's ruling, many commercial Webcasters have shut down and dozens of radio stations have stopped simulcasting. We here at KALX remain on the Web for the time being. Because we are a noncommercial station and have relatively few Internet listeners, the fees imposed by the Librarian of Congress are not crippling for us. However, it is not yet clear how we are supposed to figure out how much we owe, and there are still other issues that could shut down our stream at any time.

One is content restrictions-the DMCA imposed several such restrictions that are too complex to go into here, but which may prove impossible for us to comply with. Another is the matter of recordkeeping requirements, which remain vague at the present. The original LoC ruling would have required us to provide 18 pieces of information on every song we played, which would have been impossible without creating a new database and barcoding every one of the 76,000 recordings in our library-or, to put it succinctly, impossible. If the rules that actually get implemented are anything close to those originally proposed, this by itself could force us to pull the plug.

There was one bit of good news recently. On July 26, HR 5285, the "Internet Radio Fairness Act," was referred to the House Committee on the Judiciary. This bill would allow smaller Webcasters to defer royalty payments until next year, giving them some breathing room while negotiations continue. Unfortunately, this bill does not address the status of noncommercial broadcast streamers, and in any case it was introduced the day before Congress adjourned for its monthlong summer break-so, as of this writing, there's no way of knowing what its impact is going to be.

The Future
The future is murky, but we can be reasonably sure that streaming will survive in some form or other. It has proven notoriously difficult to make things illegal on the Internet; they tend to just change their shape and pop up again elsewhere. The death of Napster, for instance, has not stopped people from downloading music, just changed how they do it. And also, of course, the laws in question here apply only in the U.S., and the Internet is global.

But things aren't going to be the same. Streaming is going to be harder and more expensive, probably resulting in fewer options for listeners to choose from. But take heart: Even if KALX can't bring you its unique mix of music, news, sports, public affairs, and random noise over the wires, we'll still be there for you at 90.7 FM on the airwaves.

In the meantime, you can follow the ongoing developments on this issue through the Web sites Save Our Streams (www.ruf.rice.edu/~willr/cb/sos/) and RAIN, the Radio and Internet Newsletter (www.kurthanson.com). These sites also offer handy-dandy links to petitions, email form letters, and free faxes that you can use to make your opinions known to your elected officials.

Parting Shots
All things considered, we might as well be optimistic about the future of Internet radio; it doesn't cost anything, and hope is productive. But one of the first things you learn about writing is that your conclusion needs to refer back to your introduction, so I'd like to go back to where we started, which is bitter cynicism.

The demise of so many interesting and worthwhile alternative media outlets is tragic and senseless. I don't necessarily want to assess blame for this whole debacle, but I can't stop you from doing so-and if you do, you won't find a better choice than the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It was one of the main instigators of the DMCA, and its members are going to be the main recipients of whatever performance royalties eventually end up being paid.

But the RIAA's role in this is not so much evil as just stupid. It seems to have failed to grasp the fundamental distinction between streaming and file sharing, which is that streams are ephemeral; nobody gets anything from a stream that they can keep. I suppose it's theoretically possible to capture songs off a stream, but I've never heard of anyone doing it, and even if you did, what you got would be low-fi and probably full of hiccups. From where I'm sitting, audio streaming is a promotional tool that is much more likely to increase record sales than to reduce them.

That just seems like common sense, and perhaps in the end common sense will carry the day. I'm not holding my breath, but then holding your breath isn't good for you anyway. In the interest of finishing up on an upbeat note, I will leave you with a few more words from Dr. Thompson, ones from which I've always taken comfort in hard times:

I have learned to live, as it were, with the idea that I will never find peace and happiness. But as long as I know I can get my hands on either one of them once in a while, I do the best I can between high spots.

Postscript
On November 14, 2002 HR5469, the Small Webcaster Settlement Act of 2002 (SWSA) passed both houses of Congress. The SWSA delays payment of the fees until June 20, 2003 and provides a negotiation period for small and nonprofit webcasters. In addition this bill allows the Sound Exchange the ability to negotiate regarding recordkeeping. Noncommercial webcasters have until May 31, 2003 to make a settlement.

For more info:
On the legislation - thomas.loc.gov (type in HR 5496, then click on the SWSA version)

www.collegebroadcasters.org

Acronymicon:
CARP: Copyright Arbitation Royalty Panel
DMCA: Digital Milennium Copyright Act
LoC: Librarian of Congress
RIAA: Recording Industry Association of America

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