Killing Internet radio: copyright death sentence.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Citings - Brief article

ON MARCH 1, 2007, the U.S. Copyright Office announced a potential death sentence for thousands of Internet radio stations. Thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, webcasters must pay a special performance fee each time they play a recording. Under the newly enacted rate structure, those debts will be calculated based not on how much revenue a station earns but on how many listeners it has. In essence, each transmission to each individual listener will be treated as a separate licensed performance.

"It's roughly a tenfold increase," says Bill Goldsmith, co-proprietor of the eclectic rock outlet radioparadise.com, comparing this year's expected fees to the amount he was previously paying. "The rates are too much for any class of stations to pay." Goldsmith's station, for example, attracts around 250,000...