EU Public Affairs Monitor - 24/09/08

The PRO-IP Act: A game-changing law and its implications
"September 2008. In the waning weeks of what was a long and arduous presidential election campaign, people seemed so intensely focused on the campaign itself, they had probably forgotten George W. Bush would still be President the day after the election. And while the nation’s attention on the weekend of September 26 was focused on a bailout to fix the exploding economic crisis, most failed to notice that Congress passed a law whose impact remains at best unseen for musicians and the music industry. The Prioritizing Resources and Organization of Intellectual Property Act of 2007, also known as the PRO-IP Act, was passed with unanimous consent in the Senate and with an overwhelming majority in the House (renegade Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul was one of the few who voted against it, as well as the original draft of the Act in May).

The law itself is not much of a change from previous acts of similar nature (raising fines and punishments against people caught with pirated music and such), except for one major point: The law creates a new office in the White House whose purpose is dedicated to copyright infringement matters and whose head official would dictate copyright policy. This so-called “IP czar,” a term used by both the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) and the digital rights’ advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, would direct the Department of Justice and Attorne2y General as to how to handle piracy cases and the increased rate of piracy through P2P sharing." [TinyMixTapes]

Internet Radio is (almost) saved? Sep 24th 2008
"Remember how last year there was a big to do about the future of internet radio? The US Copyright Royalty Board imposed new, higher fees for online broadcasters, and web radio services like Pandora and Last.fm complained that the new fees would effectively put them out of business. A bill was introduced in Congress to work things out, but that never really went anywhere. But now, a year and a half later, the Digital Media Association, which represents a number of online music distributors, announced an agreement with copyright holders. It just doesn't exactly cover internet radio.

Here's the deal. If you're a company that provides limited music downloads or interactive streaming audio, you have to pay 10.5% of your revenue in royalties, less any amount owed for performance royalties. That covers subscription based services like Rhapsody which let you download music to your PC, so long as the music becomes useless when you stop paying up. It also covers interactive sites like Last.fm which let you select the songs you want to play." [DownloadSquad]

Agreement Reached on Internet Royalties September 23, 2008
"The contentious issue of digital royalty rates has reached a tentative conclusion, at least as far as putting agreements on paper is concerned. In an announcement made today, the warring parties entered what is termed a "historic" agreement. Whether this new agreement will challenge the Magna Carta in 800 years remains to be seen. However, in the meantime it appears the feud has been settled for interactive music services and limited download services, but the Internet radio debate remains unresolved.

Whenever an Internet radio station plays a song, it has to pay a royalty. That royalty rate remained firm at $0.000768 from 1995 until all hell broke loose in 2007. In early 2007, the US Copyright Royalty Board (a bizarre sect of the Legislative branch) increased the rates substantially. And not by a few hundred thousandths of a dollar - we're talking somewhere on the order of 300%-1200%, enough to make Internet broadcast giants such as Pandora contemplate ceasing operations. Oh, and for added kicks the rate would be retroactive to January 2006." [Slyck]

Music News Bulletin - 29/08/08

Now Hollywood is chasing UK downloaders: And getting the wrong guy 29/08/08
"Tiscali threatened to disconnect a customer for illegally downloading a TV show last week, after receiving a copyright infringement notice from a Hollywood studio. The only problem was the customer had quit the ISP months before the alleged transgression was made." [TheRegister]

Pandora prepares to join titsup.com club: Web radio outfit struggling to cover royalties 18/08/08
"This weekend saw a cry for help from personalised web radio outfit Pandora. It blubbed that music industry royalties are too high for it to survive on meagre web 2.0 advertising revenues. In a Washington Post confessional, the firm's founder and CEO Tim Westergren said: "We're approaching a pull-the-plug kind of decision. This is like a last stand for webcasting."" [TheRegister]

World shocked (shocked!) by Legal P2P: Old news sinks in 13/08/09
"Why does the idea of legal P2P - something music fans have been clamouring for since the original Napster - still cause so much confusion? Britain is set to be the first country outside Korea where punters will be offered such services (as we revealed back in June), but the idea still seems too incredible for many journalists and bloggers to comprehend." [TheRegister]

EU Gives Green Light to Sony's Acquisition of BMG 16/08/09
"Yesterday the European Union approved Sony Music's acquisition of Bertelsmann's half of its Sony BMG joint venture. Last month Sony agreed to purchase BMG from Bertelsmann for around $900 million. The need for regulators' approval is a standard procedure and an especially potent topic in a recorded music market with such concentrated ownership. The EU approval effectively ends an appeal by indie trade group Impala that asked the EU to rescind its original approval of the merger. As I wrote last year, indie label sales in the US -- either because of or in spite of the merger -- fared well since the merger. From the time of the merger through October of 2007, a period of just over three years, Sony BMG's share of US album sales dropped to 21.76% from 29.78%. Indies rose to 20.55% from 17.58%." [Coolfer]

Another Case Against Long Tail Economics 15/08/09
"At Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge, John A. Quelch has a post titled "Long-Tail Economics? Give Me Blockbusters!" Quelch is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Quelch explains the benefits and lures of blockbusters and offers five characteristics that define a blockbuster. His bottom line is this:
More risky than pursuing blockbusters is not to pursue them, to condemn your enterprise to a lifetime of slave labor harvesting the long tail of micro-opportunities rather than imagining, pursuing, and marketing the global solution to an important, widely shared problem." [Coolfer]

EU Public Affairs Monitor - 04/06/08

YouTomb: A YouTube takedown May 20, 2008
"Some enterprising MIT students are raging against the machine. In this case, they are targeting YouTube, the video-sharing website run by Internet giant Google.

The students' website, YouTomb, documents which videos are removed from YouTube for alleged copyright violations or other reasons, so they don't disappear unnoticed. You can't watch the videos on the site, but you can find out what happened to them." [LATimes]

The (knife) fight over Internet radio royalties continues June 4, 2008
"Joe Kennedy, chief executive of Pandora, carries a weapon in his battle over Internet radio royalty rates that he says could kill his popular online music site: a Stiletto.

Not the old-fashioned, sharpened-steel knife popular with mobsters and dancing street gangs in "West Side Story." This is the high-tech Stiletto 100 Portable Satellite Radio from Sirius. Kennedy brandishes it when he meets with members of Congress to highlight what he calls the inequity of the royalty rates.

The Stiletto has two antennas. One picks up Sirius' satellite signal and the other connects via Wi-Fi. But songs played over those connections pay different performance royalty rates." [LATimes]