RIAA and their lawyers says it is a crime. Being that lawyers are so studied and we depend on them for legal advise, we must listen to their advise. And remeber, the lawyers most repeated advise is “consult with a lawyer first”. How could they be wrong then?

The BUSH administration says it finances terrorism, when used along with p2p.

It causes grief to songwriters and artists who see that their music is being heard all over the world and they are not paid. This is salt in the wound, as before MP3, they were not paid either.

It causes unemployment of artists. This is also salt in the wound, as before MP3, they were also unemployed, mostly. After all, what restaurant wants to hire a pianist or band on the premises if all it will get them is a lawsuit from from the so called songwriter collectives, who when paid for using their catalog, do not give the restaurant a copy of the catalog.

It causes grief to the poor shareholders of Copyright Owners Cartel Association (COCA) assocoates, as growth of their fortunes is not increasing as rapidly as it could, for example, as fast as Bill Gate’s fortune did. After all, because MP3 has not been applied to sofware, Gate became richer that the Saudi king, and he started out with nothing, just someone else’s copyright.

And now, this radio idea. That is really dangerous for artists and songwriters that produce their work for the Copyright Owners Cartel Association (COCA) ’s benefit. And COCA is an expensive addiction that artists and songwriters will no longer be able to afford if COCA is eradicated by shared free radio MP3 music.

MP3 is dangerous when used wrong. For example, Vals Revolucionario (Revolutionary waltz) is traveling round the world for free and may actually induce some misguided people to a revolution to overthrow their benevolent dictator who saves the country a fortune in electoral expenses. Such revolutionay music could not travel around the world before, as COCA owned record companies simply do not want to shake up the dictators of the countries where they want to sell their dubious products. Just click on the link below and you will listen to the proof, Vals revolucionario.

http://rafa_venegas.web.prdigital.com/valsrev-albarosa.mp3

Rafael Venegas
http://www.genegas.com

http://digg.com/music/Download_thousands_of_songs_a_day,_legally_-_now_with_history_searching_

If one looks at the older posts on SR’s forums, you will find a post from Cary Sherman of the RIAA, so they are already well aware of SR. In fact the RIAA should be encouraging people to use SR and other similar applications. Why? The RIAA managed (with the help of Congressman James Sessenbrenner) to foist a really crappy royalties arrangement on all of web radio by coming to an ‘agreement’ with a group representing the largest webcasters. Actually that small group got a good deal, and everyone else got screwed. So, smaller webcasters are now paying royalties on a per stream per hour basis. the rate (when I last checked) was 7/10ths of a cent per stream per hour. This doesn’t sound like much, and wouldn’t be for a webcaster with 5-10 listeners. If the station gets more popular, and has 200 listeners on a 24/7 basis, the royalty payments now become significant.

Running StationRipper or any other recorder against a web radio station is treated exactly the same as an actual listener for royalty purposes. Thus, the RIAA rakes in more money when someone is merely recording a web radio station than just listening to it. Station Ripper can record hundreds of streams, limited only by one’s bandwidth and hardware performance.

The constituency that has the most issues with SR (and other recorders) are the webcasters as they are the people paying the bills, not only for royalties, but also for streaming bandwidth. Some webcasters avehemently opposed to and rabidly critical of such applications. With a few, it takes on the appearance of a psychotic obsession. The webcasters implement many countermeasures to attempt to hose a recorder’s track cutting function, such as flipping and diddling the mp3 tags transmitted with the stream, lengthy cross-fades, occasional extended silences to make the ripper think the station’s stream died, the disruptive use of sweepers, etc. The developers then implement counter-counter measures, and it’s now a silly game of “gotcha!”

(Instead of ‘playing’ this stupid game, I just record a stream as one long mp3 track and cut it and tag it myself.)

As for the RIAA, they are more focused on trying to reign in HD Radio. High Definition radio will allow terrestrial broadcaster to transmit high definition digital streams on their FM subcarriers. (See http://hdradio.com for more details) (This is how ‘MUZAK’ was distributed to supermarkets, medical offices, and elevators.) The RIAA wants a Broadcast Flag mandated that’s essentially a duplicate implementation of the infamous HDTV broadcast flag the MPAA has been pushing it’s employees, uh, I mean our Congressmen and Senators in Washington DC, to enact into law.

As it stands right now, since HD radio is a non-subscription (yes, it’s free) broadcast on the public airwaves, those ‘fair use’ rules apply to it, meaning you can record for personal use, time-shifting, etc, etc. Currently, terrestrial broadcasters do NOT pay any royalties to the recording industry. (Wouldn’t that be absurd given the modern versions of Payola various AGs are trying to clean up?) Given this new virgin territory that hasn’t been royally screwed-over yet, the RIAA is likely to focus it’s efforts here. Web radio, having been screwed-over twice, and obediently sending in royalty checks every month will not get much attention until a few more medium sized webcasters break into the ranks of major players in the medium and start asking why the emporer is naked. Again.

–TurboGeek