The Robber Baron-like move to basically put Internet webcasting out of business is more than a travesty. (I’ve read some commentary that says the move by the Copyright Royalty Board is just wrong headed. Nobody can be that wrong headed.) It threatens an entire industry (Pandora and others) that basically are looking at being out of business soon. Mark Cuban calls it the day Internet music died. I’m afraid he might be right.
If you want to read more about this and you should, Doc Searls has laid it all out in a great post called Internet Radio on Death Row that not only lays the current situation bare, but provides great historical context. An excerpt:
Internet radio is a canary in the coal mine of an insane Net-hostile Regulatorium that stretches from the cableco/telco duopoly to the copyright oligarchs who are strangling what Professor Lessig calls Free Culture. That Regulatorium should be the enemy of every free-market Republican and every free-speech Democrat. It's slowing down the U.S. and its businesses as competitors in the World Wide Marketplace we call the Net.
Will this decision to execute the Internet radio canary motivate us to do what we should have been doing more of for the past ten years? That's up to you and me.
Because if we don't do something, she's gonna die.
If you think there is hyperbole there, you’re part of the problem. Bad news folks. The bad guys are pulling it out from under us.
Head over to the Save Our Internet Radio blog and sign the petition.
