I’m probably a little bit late in writing this, but today a lot of internet radio stations shut down for the day to bring awareness to the new rates the RIAA are trying to force on them.

So today is a day of silence for 100s of thousands of internet radio stations including Live365, Pandora, AOL, and Yahoo Launchcast.  Some stations are airing conferences and debates about these issues instead of going completely silent.

I don’t remember the exact numbers, but basically the RIAA want internet radio stations to pay royalties per track played per person.  So if there’s 100 people listening for an hour to about a total of 20 songs; that counts as 2000 songs the RIAA thinks we owe them.

Satellite and normal radio stations don’t have to pay fees like this.   At least not this extreme.  Some big execs are just afraid of the internet.  They think people will/are recording internet radio streams and saving them to their harddrive.   I’m sure there are a lot of people who do this; most don’t.   What’s going to happen is that more and more people start illegally downloading music because they can’t listen to it free through their favorite internet radio station anymore.

Most small [and law abiding] internet radio stations will simply shut completely down when this comes to pass. There’s no way they’ll make enough revenue to cover the new royalty rates.  It’s estimated that royalty fees eat up about 26% of the income of major internet radio stations like yahoo and aol while with the new rates that will jump up to at least 52%.

Free internet radio stations have no chance of surviving unless they implement a lot more advertising or switch to a paysite altogether.

The sh17radio’s been down for a while anyway, but hopefully I’ll find a server somewhere out of the country that can broadcast it without breaking laws.

If you want to help out [which you do.  or else you're a dirty bastard] head over to the Save Net Radio Coalition and get the number for your local representatives and “persuade” them to adopt the Internet Radio Equality Act bill.

And check out the myths and facts page to clear some other things up.

[ picture from here ]

Connected Internet did it, so now The Sh17 has one too.

D3 BA 82 70 B9 8A 2E A4 64 FE 30 C7 A6 53 1F 4A

We’ll come after you if you steal it!

They want to give this guy 60 years in prison for doing nothing really..  He didn’t break anything.   I love how the reporter tries to act like he knows something about what he’s talking about, but doesn’t really.

“ In 2002, Gary McKinnon was arrested by the UK’s national high-tech crime unit, after hacking into NASA, and the US military. He says he spent two years looking for photographic evidence of alien spacecraft and advanced power technology. America now wants him on trial, and if tried there he could face 60 years behind bars. Gary’s been banned from using the Internet. We asked for his side of the story ahead of his extradition hearing on Wednesday,”

If you wanna read more about him, go here.

I stumbled on this today. Apparently the multi-service and multi-platform im client Gaim changed it’s name to Pidgin a few days ago. They’ve been having legal troubles with AOL since they patented AIM.

It’s still the same program, but now the developers are going to start releasing real versions and not just beta versions. Their new web page is http://www.pidgin.im/

“After a long, and unfortunately secret debate (as we could not say why we were looking at a name change, we ended up just doing this ourselves), we settled on the name “Pidgin” for gaim itself, “libpurple” for libgaim (which, as of 2.0.0 beta6, exists), and “Finch” for gaim-text.”

Source: http://www.pidgin.im/ or http://gaim.sf.net