Al's Blog-o-Sphere

Recently, the Copyright Royalty Board set new rates for internet radio to pay to play music. Acting in a way that greatly benefits the Recording Industry, who must be rubbing their hands together in glee right now counting their profits, they set them so high it will make streaming radio on the internet prohibitively expensive for even the largest entities. Even large new media outlets like NPR, AOL Radio and Live 365 are threatened by this.

Here’s what one blog, Linux Journal had to say:

In a move that recalls the Vogons’ decision to destroy Earth to clear the way for a highway bypass through space (a thankfully fictional premise of Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy), the judges comprising the Copyright Royalty Board have decided to destroy the Internet radio industry so the Recording Industry won’t be inconvenienced by something it doesn’t know, like or understand.

Read more about this and how you can take action against it:

Save Our Internet Radio
Save The Streams

At this point the only possibility is to persuade our government to change this action. Contact your Senator and Representatives and tell them you don’t want internet radio to be priced out of existence.

How this affects podcasts isn’t clear, but you can bet they will either try to apply this to it, or come up with something just as bad soon.

It’s always a pleasure to get out to a show that I’m not working on a podcast for. Not that that’s work, but, well it is. Just fun work. Still going just for the music is great too. Continue Reading…

Well, I’m in my last week of work and it’s been almost a bit surreal. Continue Reading…

The New York Times Bob Tedeschi reports:

In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” “Highway to Hell” and thousands of others.

Once again, the big record labels who do little or nothing to actually produce music, want to squeeze every penny out of their ownership of the music they don’t write, perform or understand.