Rusty's Profile

Member since April 12, 2007

  • Name

    Rusty Hodge

Favorite Files

Recent Posts

  1. Comment - Copyright Board Upholds Decision; Internet Royalty Rates Proceed

    (Apr 17, 2007 - 4:19 PM)

    It will be more like $10 a MONTH...not $10 a year. And come on, are you really going want to hear a commercial every 5 minutes? Are you going to tell me you don't skip ads on your TiVo either? :-)

    Even if Pandora managed to sell a song through the iTunes store they'd only make US$0.05 on that song. They'd need to sell each listener 5 songs a day to cover their royalty payments.

  2. Comment - Copyright Board Upholds Decision; Internet Royalty Rates Proceed

    (Apr 17, 2007 - 4:15 PM)

    $0.57 per day PER LISTENER. Not per channel. So if the royalties alone can be $17 per month per listener - and that doesn't include the ASCAP/BMI/SESAC royalties (which can add another 5% of revenues) or the cost of your streaming operations.

    Even if a listener only listens 1/4 of the time, that's over $4 a month in royalties for that listener.

  3. Comment - Dueling Musicians' Petitions Take the Internet Royalty Fight to Congress

    (Apr 12, 2007 - 1:24 PM)

    SoundExchange seems to be putting words in the mouths of artists and independent labels as a way to rally support for these drastically higher royalty rates. I've talked to some people quoted in SoundExchange press releases, and they indicated that they didn't know the whole story.

    SoundExchange will say, hey, we're trying to show that a wide variety of musicians and labels will benefit from internet broadcast royalties, and we're fighting against all these people who think the royalties shouldn't exist at all. Can we quote you as saying something to support the royalties?

    And of course, the artists supports royalties. They just don't know how unfair the CRB royalties are, and in the cases I've talked to them, they realize that these rates really are unfair and that it's not in their interest to kill off webcasters who are exposing listeners to new artists - exposure they can't get on regular radio.

    And they don't know that SoundExchange gets to write off all their expenses suing webcasters and fighting webcasters before the artists or labels get paid. All in the name of "enforcement".

    This fact was recently posted on a mailing list by an attorney who used to work for SoundExchange:

    ``SoundExchange can deduct from the royalties it collects the costs for enforcement that it conducts, so that would be limited to activities under the statutory license. For example, SoundExchange has filed public notices with the Copyright Office of its intent to audit statutory webcasters. The costs of those audits can be deducted under the language that is set forth in the Copyright Act (17 USC 114(g)(3)) and in regulations (see, e.g., 37 C.F.R. Part 262).``