83 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
83 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
<h1 id="rights-and-royalties">Rights and Royalties</h1>
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<p>If you’re new to broadcasting, or have not streamed your station online before,
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reading the following brief explanation of compensation rules for songwriters,
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musicians and other copyright holders may save you a great deal of trouble
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later.</p>
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<p>Independent music radio on the Internet has faced royalty demands from
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SoundExchange in the USA, and similar organizations in other territories. These
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organizations are usually membership societies or government-sanctioned national
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authorities which are intended to collect money from broadcasters to compensate
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copyright holders. The royalty collection societies require payment before you
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can stream just about any music released commercially to the general public —
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whether you make any money out of streaming, or not. It’s not so much the
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percentage of revenue demanded, but that there are usually annual minimum fees
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to pay, which can hurt small stations disproportionately.</p>
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<p>For example, in the UK, the MCPS-PRS Limited Online Music Licence covers
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non-commercial music streaming by groups and individuals, as long as their gross
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revenue is less then £12,500 per year. The cost is on a sliding scale, up to
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£1,120 plus 20% tax per year for delivering up to 450,000 individual streams or
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serving 25,000 files; after that, you have to apply for a full MCPS-PRS Online
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Music Licence. That doesn’t sound too bad at first, but 25,000 files per year
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works out at less than four downloads per hour for a round-the-clock website.
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This particular licence only covers publishing (songwriter) rights, not
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recording (record label and musician’s performance) rights, so you have to
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negotiate an additional licence from Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) to
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play music online, including digital recordings converted from commercially
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released CDs, vinyl or tape.</p>
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<p>Typically, you have to provide full statistical details to the royalty society
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of all music streamed or downloaded from your site, which can be onerous. Even
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if your radio station is mostly speech, there are many limitations in the small
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print of these music licences. For instance, you can’t use music for
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promotional purposes, and you can’t stream a whole opera, without negotiating
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separate licences. Weirdly, you are not allowed to play a piece of music in a
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‘derogatory context’ to the writer or performers; no drummer jokes allowed,
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then.</p>
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<p>However, the biggest pitfall is that these MCPS-PRS licences for publishing
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rights only cover listeners in the UK. For recording rights, PPL is a member of
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the IFPI reciprocal scheme for webcasters, which means its licenses cover
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listeners in some European countries, Australia, New Zealand and a few other
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countries, but not listeners in the USA or Canada. So if your Internet station
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picked up a significant number of listeners in countries not covered by the
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MCPS-PRS licences or the IFPI reciprocal scheme, you would have to pay for
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similar music licences in those countries as well. It’s no wonder that many
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not-for-profit radio stations have disappeared from the virtual airwaves over
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the last few years, since not having the right licences could leave the operator
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liable to legal action.</p>
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<p>If you want to go down the commercial music route, check out the
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<a href="http://www.prsformusic.com">http://www.prsformusic.com</a> and <a href="http://www.ppluk.com">http://www.ppluk.com</a> websites for UK licence
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details. In the USA, the <a href="http://www.soundexchange.com">http://www.soundexchange.com</a> website currently quotes
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a 500 dollar minimum annual fee for non-commercial webcasters, plus a usage fee
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above a certain number of listener hours, for the right to stream music
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recordings to listeners. See the websites of <a href="http://www.ascap.com">ASCAP</a>,
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<a href="http://www.bmi.com">BMI</a> and <a href="http://www.sesac.com">SESAC</a> for details of music
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publishing royalties payable by webcasters streaming to the USA.</p>
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<p>Free content streaming offers an alternative for DIY Internet radio. Since
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royalty collection societies like MCPS-PRS and SoundExchange can only represent
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the interests of their own members, it follows that if you are not a member, you
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can stream your own self-produced content without paying for their licences. If
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you state somewhere on your website that the stream is of your own copyrighted
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material, and is made available to the public under a specific licence, then
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no-one should misunderstand your intentions.</p>
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<p>You might be able to persuade other people to allow you to stream their content
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too, as long as they do not have a conflicting legal obligation, such as having
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previously joined one of the many royalty collection societies around the world.
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You can ask for permission to stream when website visitors upload their own
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music files to you via a HTML form, much as the likes of SoundCloud do. Or you
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can collect files licensed under an appropriate Creative Commons licence
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(<a href="http://www.creativecommons.org">http://www.creativecommons.org</a>) or other free content licence.</p>
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<p>Explicit permission to stream on your particular server is always going to be
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the ideal, so think about your own terms and conditions before you accept files
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from third parties for streaming. How, for example, would you know if someone
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uploaded a file to your online radio station that unknown to you, had been
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ripped from a commercially released CD? That’s the kind of thing that could get
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you in trouble with the licensing authorities and copyright holders.</p>
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