RIAA go Away

The letters and emails just keep coming.  Looks like Mashuptownradio.com will be pulled from the net soon too.  If anyone has or knows of someone who has server space in Russia will you let us know.

Here is the latest notice we've received:

Dear Live365 Broadcaster -

The RIAA has been in touch with us recently to let us know that they have found a number of stations that are not compliant on the service.

This is something we take very seriously, so we're going to ask for your help here.

But first, I want to give some back story for those of you who’ve not been involved in internet radio that long.

In 1998, Congress passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This piece of legislation established parameters around which one could build a
business in instances where copyrighted digital material is concerned (e.g. music, software). It also built in some protections for the content
companies who produce said digital material, (e.g. the RIAA) as they wanted to ensure that internet distribution wouldn’t cannibalize sales.

>>>For the purposes of internet radio, the resulting restrictions included:

1) Broadcasters must display complete ID3 tag information.
2) Broadcasters must comply with “The Rules” http://www.live365.com/info/rules.html
3) No unauthorized or “bootleg” recordings
4) For LIVE broadcasters, broadcasters must make sure the track metadata is streaming to the Player Window.

In their recent communication, the RIAA notified us that they have observed stations that are out of compliance with one or more of these rules.

>>>This is where we need your help:

Please take a moment to ensure your ID3 tag information is completed, and make sure your playlist is not in violation with the song complement rules
(outlined in The Rules, here http://www.live365.com/info/rules.html ), and that you’re not playing any illegally recorded, unauthorized or bootleg
material.


>>>To assist you, we have:

We have created a new field on the broadcast page to help you identify whether your station is compliant, and - if not - what the problem is. Within
the next week, we will be releasing an improvement to the Playlist Analyzer  to help broadcasters identify compliance problems within each playlist.
We've also created a troubleshooting page at http://forums.live365.com/viewtopic.php?t=28306.

We will send out an additional reminder about this within the next couple of weeks. If stations continue to operate OUT of compliance, we will
reserve the right to shut them down or otherwise restrict access.

If you have any other questions about your station's compliance, please contact our legal department at legal AT live365 DOT com.

Thanks for your attention to this matter.

betty ray
Live365 Senior Editor and
Director of Community

Live 365
4th Floor - 950 Tower Lane
Foster City, CA 94404

You all have a great Thanksgiving Day wherever you are and thanks for all the emails, messages, kind words, and support.  Peace.

AW

Comments

[Aggro1]

Oh Lord.

They'll.never.stop.this.

[art]

This is easy. Don't like the RIAA or DMCA? Don't operate from America. If you've got the resources to run an internet radio station, you've got the resources to run one form outside of the US. Try Norway -- better legal systems there when it comes to all this mess.

[Jack]

Norway, Austria, Belgum you could go there or you could come to Australia, where everything is right! Too Roo Then Mate!

Peace

[Arty Fufkin]

Hey this sucks - whatever you decide to do, thanks for everything.

[xmodither]

Let's make creativity illegal, eh?
Thanks for the fight and great inspirational toones.
Hopefully a new server will let you continue soon.

[Matt]

Wait, so they're not allowing anything not made by the RIAA on live 365? Although, this wasn't directed at you, but to everyone. At least, that's what it looks like.

[Karl Elvis]

This SUCKS, dude.

[MrMachine]

hey jack - things are *not* right in australia ... we have the exact same DMCA legislation as the USA, thanx to John Howard and our Free Trade Agreement with the US.

[Bill B]

Whatever happened to fair use??

[Brian Hicks]

Really love the site. I hope you don’t have to shut it down.

[slashdotter]

thats just nuts.
isnt America supposed to be the "land of the free".

[Zane]

I had my parents listen to two Beastles mash-ups. They loved them.

I'm sorry to see something as creative and cool as this become a target for the recording industry - and even more so that they would think that this would effect any final metrics on illegal distribution of copyrighted material.

Let's crack down on DJ's who do live sets, too. I mean - you're telling me that in the history of live spinning, that no one has just given something a try without holding rights to reproduce and mix it into something else? Let's see to it that those people are brought down, too.

Hey, let's just go all out and seek out any one who reproduces the same chords, melodic line, or beat pattern... and any lyric more than, say - 5 words... enough to establish some sort of ownership rights to having said that - and let's go after them too.

Because, you know - nothing good ever comes from playing around with a musical genre - ever. Everyone knows that once a genre is established, it exists forever in the same state that it was birthed in - thus the reason Top 40's stations play a lot of Elvis, Righteous Brothers, and King Crimson. Oh. Wait.

This was not intended as something for people to make money off of - this was intended as something creative and fun. DJ Food's "Raiding the 20th Century" is a wonderful example of how far things have come, and the general light-hearted atmosphere of Mash-Ups.

Music is supposed to be an escape, an expression, and something you can play around with and conform to your own personal form of expression - not something that can be defined through a color-by-number where all the colors are Crayola's "Red Tape" shade.

Sorry for the rant.
-afx.

[DJHDD]

Sorry to hear you guys will no longer be able to play music made by the common man. As a radio announcer here in Sydney who has been playing bootlegs for the last 4 years, I am giving up for totally different reasons than being persued by the record companies. Things are not "allright" here in Australia, it's that lazy attitude & apathy that will see us in that same situation one day. I am giving up due to the "anonominity" of radio broadcasting,"who's listening" at least with podcasting or Interent based braodcasting you could see who was listening. So thought I'd give up & do something similiar to you guys via a podcast, and this is the way we will be able to fight this war, once one goes down lets get 2 back up. If you have a server help these guys out & please participate in things like Dean Grey Tuesday - http://gray.alt.fm//

[Michael]

Sorry to hear that. I used to broadcast on Live365 too (a punk rock covers station) and left the server when all the RIAA crap started to go down. Live365 are pussies and they never stand up for their internet radio DJs.

Glad you're back up on this site though. I love the stuff you find.

[Jim Gelatt]

Is this why 365 radio if off line and none of it's links are good? I just became a VIP Member and loved it! Is it fixable? iTunes won't work on 365 stations but it's fine on others. Help!!

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[funkturnal]

from the research i've read even if u ran the server on mars it wouldn't matter because they would still track the source of the stream which would be the states. unless u move. ha.

but there are ways around i guess. if u ran the station on the server itself instead of streaming. but i've searched for this in the pass but didn't find anything. I'm sure there is a way to do this.