Internet broadcaster eyes Canada as way to escape “unfair” digital music fees

At least one independent radio broadcaster in the U.S. says he’s willing to pull up stakes and move to Canada to avoid paying a controversial new copyright fee for songs that he plays on the Internet. Robert Pullman, founder of Inetprogramming in Moses Lake WA, says he’s contemplating a return to his native country where he already has one server operating in Victoria BC to avoid millions in potential new fees that his stations simply can’t afford. Internet law experts here say the new fees, recently decided on by the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP), are no joke, and that hundreds of college radio stations with no option to move might be the hardest hit. The fees are currently being appealed by a coalition of U.S. radio stations, webcasters, and record companies – supported by the well-known metrics firm Arbitron – which says the copyright levies to be paid to artists and record companies will stifle the nascent webcasting industry. Fredricton NB-born Pullman, who runs several channels of bluegrass, rock, jazz and other programming from Moses Lake, says the new fees, which he claims will cost stations US$200 per listener per year, are too high. Pullman’s figures, however, conflict with other interpretations of the CARP decision, which say the $0.014 per performance fee will only cost stations $1.40 per thousand listeners (the proposed fee for Internet retransmissions of over-the-air signals is half). The difference, says Pullman, is that he reads the rules to mean the U.S. Copyright Office will treat each stream as a "performance", thus greatly increasing the potential hit. Pullman says he’s pumped US$60,000 into his Internet stations in the past two years, and has recorded only US$300 in revenue – mostly from independent label ads featured on the site. He says a fairer way to pay for the music he plays would be as a percentage of revenue, money he’d be happy to part with to continue to stay in business. In 1998, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act authorized the payment, for the first time, of royalties to labels and artists for music played on the Internet. The new fees were introduced by CARP following a negotiation involving the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), webcasters, and the Digital Media Association, which ultimately proved fruitless. Last year, the U.S. Copyright Office established the three-person CARP to look at the issue. The rates decided on by CARP have come under widespread criticism for being modeled on a deal hammered out between RIAA and Yahoo!, before the dot com crash. Whether the $200 per person per year figure or smaller $1.40 per thousand listeners for each song played is more accurate, Pullman also takes issue with several new reporting requirements for Internet stations, called a "Listener’s Log". The log would identify the name of the service, the channel or program accessed, information on the user such as the date and time the user logged in and out, the time zone of the place at which the user received the transmission, the user identifier and country of reception. The Copyright Office has also proposed making one-month intended playlists a requirement. In his comments to CARP before the decision was made last month, Pullman makes clear his displeasure with the measures. "‘Intended Playlists’ are company confidential in the broadcast world as the ability to increase readership is dependent upon secrecy," he writes. "Telling what music is to be played or what the programming will entail is the equivalent of selling your soul to the enemy…An attempt to gain such information in this manner is nothing less than information theft. The United States laws protect security of company confidential information." Pullman contends that sensitive information will fall into the big record labels’ hands since they will be responsible for collecting the new fees.

Internet broadcaster eyes Canada as way to escape “unfair” digital music fees

Broadcast | April 8, 2002

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