Poncelet and Wil Wheaton, and probably a whole bunch of other people who I don’t bother reading, want you to know that the RIAA is conspiring with the government to wipe out internet radio. Well, I’m hear to tell you that the big issue isn’t that the RIAA wants their members to earn an incredible 14/10000ths of a dollar every single time you listen to a song over the internet. The big issue is that the government has created this nightmare where the copyright owners no longer have control over how much they earn or who is allowed to play their creations.

My point is this, webcasters are lucky that they get to negotiate with a government royalty board over how much they should pay for the music they are allowed to play. If they were forced to negotiate directly with the copyright holders it would be a much different story. Most would want more than .14 cents per play, a few wouldn’t mind less. But they would have to negotiate with each one, and they would have to cut checks to each one, and if they screwed up then they’d end up in court against each one.

In my opinion, it’s the copyright holders that continue to lose in this deal.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.