Webcasting Developments 2009

On December 30, 2008, the Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking .  The notice contained at least three substantial changes to the current recordkeeping procedures used college and high school webcasters that do not pay any more than the minimum fee to SoundExchange.  One of these changes include a switch from sample  periods of 14 days each calendar quarter to census (24/7/365) reporting.  That means instead of compiling data about programming for 56 days of the year, stations would now need to compile data for every day of the year.  Another proposed change would eliminate the use of “Aggregate Tuning Hours” (ATH) in reports of use.  ATH is a calculation of the total number of hours that people listen to a station.  For example, if 1 person listens for one hour, the ATH would be 1.  If 10 people listen for that same hour, the ATH would be 10.  In lieu of reporting ATH, the CRB proposes that stations would need to report any and all listening to each song.  The third change would be the introduction of a deadline to submit reports of use.  Currently, there is no deadline, which is something that needed to be addressed.  The CRB, however, chose to require monthly reports of use and that they be submitted on or before the 45th day after the close of each month.  Obviously, this will create a problem for many school stations that have long breaks, such as during the winter or summer.

Read the complete story, including copies of submitted comments in the proceeding.

UPDATE: CBI has submitted a Motion to allow for reply comments.  If granted, this would allow CBI and any station to submit comments in reply to the comments made by SoundExchange which support the proposal for census reporting, per performance reporting and monthly reporting of those statistics within 45 days after the close of each month.  All interested parties that want to express their thoughts on the comments submitted by SoundExchange should file a motion in support of the CBI motion.  It is simple to do and may be submitted via email.  Questions?  Copyright@askcbi.org.

Additionally, Congress passed a bill called the Webcaster Settlement Act, which allowed Webcasters and services to negotiate a settlement concerning fees and terms, including recordkeeping through 2015.  It appears at this point that NPR and NAB have reached settlements.  The noncommercial and educational stations, to our knowledge have not reached an agreement and the deadline to reach a settlement has passed.  More details are provided on all of this at  Read the complete story.