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Business Week Online recently published a "Viewpoint" piece by SoundExchange executive director John Simson (pictured right), the first of a series of opinion pieces regarding the Copyright Royalty Board’s decision on webcaster royalty rates.

In our presentation here, we’ve interjected responses and counter-arguments from RAIN Publisher Kurt Hanson into Simson’s article. The full article is available here.

"There’s a lot of commotion in Washington these days over Internet radio royalty rates. Much of it is coming from large corporate Webcasters and their lobbyists, who are trying to execute a classic Washington end-run. They don’t like the results they got from a process they set in motion, so they have gone back to Congress with sky-is-falling histrionics in hopes of getting a do-over.

RAIN analysis: Webcasters did not “set this process in motion!” Legislators did not instinctively, on their own, decide to grant a performance right to the copyright owners of sound recordings for music played on digitally-delivered radio (in 1995’s DRPA; see RAIN article here); they did so in response to heavy lobbying from the music industry. And they did it at a time (more than a decade ago) when there were very few music-based Internet radio stations in existence to take the other side in the debate. The minor change that webcasters requested in the process recently — to move from impartial arbitrators (a “CARP”) to impartial judges (a “CRB”) — was merely a procedural tweak that didn’t change the substantive nature of the process. It’s unfair to claim that the process was "set in motion" by webcasters.

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