greed of licenes

[mikenico]

Most would agree that internet radio stations are more of individuals that enjoy it as a hobby and have no financial gain in creating a radio station, I speak to many from the UK and would love for a modest fee go legal but the expenpance of paying two instutues and over £1000 per year is not affordable to the hobbyist, hence why there are so many that are illegal not only do the radio promote the music of these companies on behalf of their
artists byt they also want to charge the people that feed them, I did speak to both instutues about this and suggested a flat one of yearly fee to broadcast legal, this would be for an no finacual gain to the broadcaster.

this would open more money to these companies as more would want to go down the legal route, bt alas they never learn, bit the prohibition in the 1920's until some bright spark woke and said lets make it legal and cheap this way we make more money then we would keeping it legal,

piracy on exists because the legal version is well over priced known dam fact.

 

[General Lighting]

a minor legal point - in many jurisdictions a Internet station not registering with the copyright authorities and paying its fees (if it ever went as far as Court) is more likely to be judged as unlawful (against civil law) rather than illegal (against criminal law).

if you play records on a broadcast station you have broken the civil contract that exists in the "small print" of your download site or for the older folk amongst us, often written in a circle around the label of a vinyl gramophone record forbidding broadcasting. that is supposedly a binding contract and breaking that is unlawful.

if you buy 1000 xtc-pills, sell them for profit and use this profit to buy a 100W FM radio transmitter and then broadcast into the airwaves without a Communications Ministry license, (like some naughty people did back in the day), what you are doing definitely is illegal on many more counts and would be treated more harshly if/when you did get caught.

Ironically the waters here are muddied by a precedent set by land based pirate stations and musicians and artists on the EDM scene since the 1980s, who operated nearly in a "underground cash based economy" with very murky elements, and willingly gave up their rights to the broadcast royalties in return for pirate stations publicising their tracks, and derived their revenue from a combination of physical record sales, revenue from events advertised by the station, and laundered drugs money.

For these reasons they do not always keep accounts of many things, making the complex copyright reporting schemes of the mainstream music industry irrelevant. Especially when the broadcaster, music producer and DJ were often closely linked groups of friends or indeed, the very same people!

Internet stations are much more the successors of the small land based pirate stations than of mainstream broadcasters, they are both cleaner and safer in not creating electromagnetic pollution nor being interlinked with criminality so really should be encouraged but the copyright authorities have not kept up with developments.

As well as costs, many of their clauses and rules are unworkable for a station which plays a combination of old and new DJ sets of constantly beatmixed music, as it is not strictly definable when one track ends and another starts, bits of tracks are mixed in with another constantly (this is forbidden by some copyright authorities!) and only in recent years have modern DJ's used computer software that automatically generates track lists.

the music industry will have to learn to become like the mobile telephone industry, where increasingly often a flat rate is charged for the use of a certain amount of data (rather than per use and with complex billing), affordable to all and without a complex way of doing business. TBH it is the specialised internet music stations which are keeping the digital music industry going, not the other way round, if anything labels and musicians should be giving broadcasters promos with automatic rights (to be fair some do for the more popular broadcasters).