CBI and Others File Comments Regarding Webcasting Rules

In December of 2008, the Copyright Royalty Judges (“CRJs”) issued a Notice of Proposed Rule Making (“NPRM”) which contained proposals to increase the recordkeeping requirements.  Specifically, the CRJs proposed that all webcasters using copyrighted music w/o releases would need to report each and every song played throughout the year, which is known as census reporting.  Currently, stations operating under the statutory license only need to report two one week samples per calendar quarter.  The CRJs also proposed that reports would need to be filed with SoundExchange on a monthly basis.  Further, the CRJs proposed to require stations to report the number of listners to each and every song, which is known as Actual Total Performances (“ATP”), rather than the currently permitted Aggregate Tuning Hours (“ATH”).  ATH is a metric which tells how many people listened to the webcast over a period of time, in this case, the two one week periods being sampled.  For background information, see our our coverage here. 

In response to the comments submitted by CBI and other parties, the CRJs issued a Notice of Inquiry, which asked a number of questions pertinent to the proceeding. To see some of the submitted comments, see this page.