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.

Commenting is closed for this article.

Other blog entries
Kurt's summary of the Internet radio royalty dispute
iPhone's radio apps are a canary in a coal mine
Part 2: DI's Ari Shohat on how to grow audience
Digitially Imported's Ari Shohat reveals how he built a huge global audience
Emmis's Jeff Smulyan responds re: FM in cell phones
Ramsey: "Broadcasters don't understand the radio 'experience'"
Honolulu's Brock Whaley: "I have heard the future in my car"
Newspaper seems intent on driving print subscribers away
CBS Radio gets it; Mason and Goodman appear in Chicago
Radio Heard Here is a misguided campaign