Futures for Webcasting: Regulatory Approaches in Australia and the U.S.

This is the latest version of this eprint.

Abstract

In the history of the still-fledgling media form of online radio, the year 2002 will come to be seen as a time of drawn-out legal and legislative battles over sound recording royalties which seemed to spell the end for U.S. Webcasters at a number of points during the conflict. Protagonists in this trench warfare were a loose and increasingly fragmented coalition of online radio operators from the very small to the very large, and including Net-only Webcasters as well as the rebroadcasters of terrestrial stations, and on the other side the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and its SoundExchange royalty collection agency as the representatives of performance copyright holders (yet following a wider agenda which remains the subject of intense guesswork). Also appearing in a story which at times began to resemble an episode of The West Wing were a motley crew including the Librarian of Congress, an ugly CARP, and – in an unlikely role as saviour of the industry – veteran Republican Senator Jesse Helms.