Author: Paul
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Is Digital Radio a Goldmine for the Recording Industry? More on the RIAA quest for royalties.
A News.com article reports: “Digital conversion will put radio under the purview of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a controversial 1998 law that some believe has greatly expanded the powers of copyright holders. ” In short, this means that when broadcasting in digital a traditional brodcast station indeed may have to pay royalties to the…
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Recording Industry’s Been Banging the Royalties Drum For a Long Damn Time; The Quest for Total Control Is Endless
Let’s go back eleven years, to 1991. Like now, the recording industry was in a pitched battle over piracy. Only then, the ship was called “home taping,” not mp3. Digital audio tape, which would allow for bit-perfect copies of CDs, was threatening to land stateside from Japan, and blank audiocassette sales were through the roof.…
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Wired Finally Gets Critical of IBOC Digital Radio
Wired News has now decided to take a listen to critics of IBOC Digital Radio, like Pete TriDish of the Prometheus Low-Power Radio Project and the Media Access Project. Hooray for Wired News — it’s good to know that they’re not just industry shills. Too bad that they mostly only reach a tech-savvy geek crowd…
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It’s Time for Indy Journalists To Start Pissing People Off
…It’s time to break some eggs, and get the attention of more of the public, even those who might not give two shits about a protest in DC, and who may not even give two shits about protestors being pre-emptively arrested and brutalized. We don’t have to pander to them — we have to piss…
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Dead Dataplay
While the idea may sound good on paper, I think it was clear the thing was doomed from the start. What they were trying to sell was portability and convenience, but Dataplay didn’t offer significantly more portability or convenience than CD-Rs or minidiscs.
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(Supreme) Courting Favor
Lawrence Lessig has posted his own lucid thoughts about how things went arguing the Eldred case in front of the Supreme Court. His best hint for the interpretive exercise known as “Supreme Watching” is this: “Lots of people have made tons of noise about what the court asked questions about and what it did not…
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What a Red Herring — the AP asks: Is “anything goes” radio all but gone?
Let me be very, very clear. Not at this time, nor at any time in the last twenty years, has commercial radio seen anything approaching “anything goes” radio. Never. Yes, with the rise of the co-called “shock jock” we have seen a suffocating tidal wave of no-talent frat-boys turn morning radio into a barnyard cesspool…
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More Coverage of IBOC Debacle
John Anderson’s put together a special report on yesterday’s IBOC decision, picking through the video from the FCC’s meeting for the choice bits uttered by the commissioners and bureaucrats.
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Digital Radio: A Spectrum Giveaway in Disguise
Markedly absent from news reports on this or in the FCC’s own announcement is that IBOC doubles the bandwidth used by a station, taking up the space on the dial between stations that has been historically used to prevent interference.