Copyright in the digital age always seems like an ill fitting shoe to me. On the one hand, it is indeed important that (music) artists and other content providers get paid for their work, and then perhaps it is fair that those who make more popular content get paid more. Perhaps... But if it is, then it seems to make sense that you link payment to the number of times something is accessed, which you can basically only know if you:
a) have access to all computers and charge an amount to the owner for having the content on it (which would be a horrible idea), or controlling the content player so it only plays what the owner of the content player paid for.
b) are the sole distributor of the content.
c) have a combination of those, like iTunes, which is a music player that can only play the songs you actually paid for, and at the same time lets you purchase songs easily.
There have been many, many lawsuits and problems with the b. category, because it is ridiculously easy to copy and distribute digital content and spread it around for free. The model seems to have been copied over from the real world, where material duplicators have not yet been invented, and now, lawyers the world over are fighting individuals over uploading content through non-authorized free distributors, such as torrent sites and youtube, and Kazaa and Napster before that. Of course, each time they have a partial success, the big boulder rolls down again - because it will always be ridiculously easy to copy digital content. Copying is what computers do really well. It seems obvious that a new payment model is required. Some bands have argued that they do not get much money at all for any records they sell, and that the so-called digital piracy is actually great promotion for the live shows that they do earn decent money with. Games, most famously World of Warcraft, have found that hosting multiplayer services is a great way to ensure that they get paid: you don't pay for the game world, but for access to the multiplayer server. However, I have not seen such solutions for movies and books, though it seems that the personal desktop is no real alternative to either: the experience you get in a cinema has not been killed by the pre-digital copying device vcr, and reading books from a screen has not yet caught on as much, even though hand-held digital reading devices like Kindle seem to have made a (temporary?) upsurge lately.
Radio falls in the a. category, because the radio host decides what to play, and you usually pay for it by listening to endless ads. Then, the radio station pays a portion of their profits to the content provider, which in this country is mostly supervised by a single foundation Buma/Stemra. I assumed they were some kind of bureaucratic body, but of course not, they are a private enterprise with profits and dividends, and one of their top secretaries is a big shot at a music publishing company - making it quite obvious that this is not just about protecting artists, but a whole industry, who we owe a living. Anyway.......
The reason I am starting a thread about this now is because of a report of a recent court case (
link in Dutch) fining, and banning, a very popular website (2.47 million unique visitors per month) called Nederland.fm that collected a whole number of radio streams on one page. The website simply had an audio player in the middle, and then 36 icons around it of all of the biggest radio stations in the country. Clicking on an icon would play the radio stream through the central audio player, so you didn't need to switch websites to switch the channel. This kind of service is called a radio portal. It's very convenient, but apparently not simply allowed. It turns out Buma/Stemra has given permits to the individual radio stations to play their radio streams on their respective websites, on the basis of target audiences visiting those specific websites. Isolating just the stream on a different website, as Nederland.fm did, brought in a different audience (according to the court), and that was not what Buma/Stemra agreed to. Another - and perhaps more important - reason the court finds this portal problematic is that Nederland.fm has ads on its website, generating income for its owner, a mr. Souren. Souren did not pay dues out of these revenues to Buma/Stemra, effectively exploiting the musical works within the streams, while there is a specific billing structure for such portals.
That means that Souren was operating outside of agreements, and the website is rightly taken down. However, the agreement seems to me incredibly short-sighted. People apparently massively prefer Souren's portal website to the specific "audiovisual environments" of the radio stations. What seems to matter there, is the audio part, not so much the visual: it's radio after all. Hence, it seems to me that the radio station is responsible for owning the musical rights, and they pay for them out of their revenues. If more people hear their ads, their revenue goes up, and hence they pay more to Buma/Stemra (13% of net income with a minimum of €780 per year). It can't be true that ads listened through a portal, rather than directly on the website, cannot be counted: they had a way of estimating those numbers back when radio was analog. I don't really see where "target audience" comes in. Am I an illegal listener when I browse to classic.fm, because I am not a target audience, being a young person? Perhaps the advertisers pay a bit more for their ads targeted to older folk on classic.fm, but it's not the portal's fault I like to listen to it sometimes. Perhaps it helped me find it: in that case, the advertisers should figure out that every once in a while, it may be helpful to try to market young people stuff on classic fm, because there may be more people like me on the portal. I still don't see why Buma/Stemra has any say in all of that.
I am more sympathetic to the argument that Souren is exploiting the artistic content by making profits off collecting the streams on his website. But when I step back, I keep seeing that the ads on the radio streams are supposed to generate the revenue for the artists. I wonder if we are charging radio manufacturers for providing the same tool as the portal, or google for linking to all kinds of artistic stuff and making a profit out of that. I keep concluding that trying to contain copyright on the internet is a very clumsy kid.
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