SL DJ's, Music Royalties, and the RIAA

From what I can tell, most of these "DJ"'s in the clubs scattered all over SL seem to be playing mp3s they get off of p2p, honoring requests by downloading music on the spot. I am not trying to condemn anybody or complain, as I personally do not feel there is anything wrong with this.

But I feel as if I have too much to risk by doing this should the RIAA grow wise to the rampant streaming type activities we tend to do here, not to mention being on a college network makes me a likely target for a RIAA lawsuit, they have marched through the dorm halls here and passed out fines for file sharing before. I figure it is only a matter of time before they find SL and start suing people, because they are already suing people who post videos of themselves dancing to commercial music on youtube who are not licensing that music(whish is rediculous imho).

I was curious about what it would take to be a legal SL DJ after the day comes when RIAA starts to notice what is happening here. I want to prepare for that day. From what I can tell for a regular web radio you can pay a blanket royalty(which allows you to play all music) so long as you obey the rules which dictate what order you play your music in and which artist you play and how you announce the tunes you have played, or you can get permission from every copyright owner whose music you play. There also seems to be this "performance" royalty associated with playing music at any sort of gathering place which I am not sure applies to virtual spaces or not.

SL seems to be a unique situation regarding these music royalties in that it is a place, yet it is also a web stream, and I suspect the RIAA will ask for BOTH sets of royalties from anybody playing music here, once we become a big enough target.

It seems the only way to go for somebody who doesn't have a lot of money is to go hunting for tunes with the alternative licenses which allow you to stream without paying. I highly doubt an SL DJ makes enough L$ to pay off the royalties that the law dictates. I plan to attempt this ameteur music thing but I fear that nobody will listen to my music when they compare it to the commercial tunes that most DJ's are pirating. I guess I'm not in this for the money though, so it really isn't that big of a deal to me, I just wonder what the rules are regarding a DJ in SL who wants to be legal.

You can join memberships that allow you to have a liscense. There are also other stipulations. You shoudl looking into shoutcasting rules and such. I had my own radio station. Each dj had their own liscense and it was not the radio stations thing.

Last time i looked my dj's were paying $150 or so for a broadcasting lisc.

I'm no expert or lawyer, but it seems that the question rotates around precedent.

Second Life is cutting edge technology, and there simply isn't precedent for such things yet.

If you asked a lawyer from RIAA, they would interpret things one way, likely to be the most profitable way for them.

If you asked someone at the Electronic Frontier Foundation they may see it another way. I'd strongly recommend asking an expert here: http://www.eff.org/


In any case, I see it likely worthwhile for RIAA to sue a few people first with some serious cash behind them; if they can swing the first few cases their way they might be able to muster some intimidation factor.

I suspect it's no accident they went after mostly broke college students + families when pressing their first cases a few years ago.

I'm actually writing up a few articles about this issue, and how to deal with them.

YES, in order to stream licensed music you need to get permission. There's a few ways to do it, first is getting direct permission from the artist (this works best with underground and upstart bands, or those you can find on myspace), but for the popular "signed" artists, you have a few other steps to go through. (The third way is to go through Creative Commons and find out which artists allow their music to be streamed online without any permission).

When you’re dealing with the RIAA, you essentially have to talk to several agencies and acquire license with them, which means talking to ASCAP, BMI, SESAC (Song Writers Fees) and SoundExchange (Record Labels, Producer, Performer Fees) and acquiring licenses from each one of those organizations. This also means that you will have to deal with a fair amount of recording and reporting to theses agencies of what songs you played, and when, and how, etc.

You can also stream through an agency that deals with the licensing costs. There's really two of them, the first being Live365 (but it does not really work with Second Life), the second being Loudcity.net (they are really good, and preferably the better service). Compared to the costs above, Loudcity.net licensing feeds START at $19.95 per month, and really cover major music. When you deal with the underground, indie, unsigned etc, it's really best that you get their permission to play their music.

Mind you even after your licensed, there are some rules that you must follow to keep legal (such as not playing more than 3 songs from the same artist within a two hour period or playing more than 2 songs from the same album in the same timeframe or playing them back to back)

Hoped this helped you, there's a few things in the words on my end to make this sort of information more readily available and in one place

As far as I have looked into it and heard from my DJ's (I'm a DJ manager for a club), alot are actually using pay for services anyways.

An alternative to all this is that if you use a pay for service (such as iTunes, or a monthly service or a 1 time pay fee such as LimeWirePro) and you broadcast that music, it falls under your ownership usability, since you are not 'selling' the music you have already paid for.

However, I see RIAA a long ways off. Simply for that fact that they can't verify through SL that the music was pirated as long as DJ's don't mention it over the air, and privacy states that they cannot badger SL to give out RL information to link you to the av anyways. So it's a hard to track thing, based only on rumors of who 'might' be downloading for free and a lot of man hours just to check and find out. They have more to deal with as far as pirated CD's being transferred to people for resales and such. The targets they have chosen are people who were downloading by the thousands per day.

Of course this is speculation on all of our ends, but if you want to be totally legal about it, then you can choose to acquire the license as previously stated, or takes your chances. I would think taking my chances is a better spot as far as money, by the time they do any investigation, the fine's probably gonna be less than paying for a license the whole time.

Well I didnt try too hard to find out where peple were getting their music, it was pretty obvious, you can hear an mp3 download, and smetimes the dj's announce the songs with the wront artist name, as if they downloaded a mislabled mp3. And you hear kids talking about songs they are going to play "as soon as they finish downloading" all the time.

But yeah, if you are a legit DJ licensing the stuff you play, chances are the royalties are gonna put you in the red no matter how much L$ you make! Figure your max crowd can ever be maybe 80 people, if your really really lucky you can pull that kind of crowd maybe once a week. If you played every day making between 2k and 10k, is that enough to cash out enough to pay all those licenses? Plus the overhead invlved in all the reporting and rule following, doesnt leave much time to go tune hunting. I can definately understand just waiting until they come and try to stop us, but they found my roomate! Granted he was in trouble mainly for sharing star trek episodes, but he definately wasnt sharing them to any bigger goupr of people than the crowds that clubs in SL tend to get.

Itunes purchases don't come with a license to play the tunes over the net, nor does limewire, hell, buying the vinyl doesn't even grant you that right.

In RL clubs they (the venue) pays an agency which covers the performance rights for every song played there. For streams there is that same performance license, plus more for the ability to stream, whic seems to be so high that only the most succesful commercial strations can actually afford to do it without going in the red.

That loudcity thing looks like the best option so far, still doubt most SL DJ'scan pull 20 RL dollars a month though

You have left out, that you can NOT play 3 songs in a row from the same artist. HAs to do with ripping. SO for those that do Double and Tripple shots... not to wise...

Opps someone did mention it.. good

This is the primary reason I use Live365. As another poster noted, as long as I stream within the rules, I am covered as far as licensing and royalties go. I also own all the music I play, to the tune of some 700 CDs right now. I don't download music from any sort of P2P network. That's my personal decision - if I don't own the media, I don't rip it.

Contrary to what one other poster noted, I have been streaming Live365 into Second Life with very few problems for going on 2 years now. The worst issue is when they occasionally bounce the stream and I end up on a new URL. It's a bit of a hassle to track that down as the Live365 URL is a nightmare

I will be checking out Loudcity though - that sounds interesting.

Streaming a Live365 station in to SL isn't actually legal. Live's deal with the RIAA requires that the stream only be launchable through the listen button on the station page on Live's site, so technically speaking it's still not kosher with the RIAA if people are initiating the stream by simply entering an SL parcel. LoudCity is the same. Their streams are only supposed to be launched from a URL residing on one of their site pages.

Personally I feel that having music playing on a land parcel in SL is no different than having it playing in a RL house and having people over as long as the URL is hidden. If the URL is open and people can tune in from anywhere it's another story. The chances of the RIAA agreeing with that are exactly nil though.

Having said all that, I relay my Live365 station in to SL now and then myself.

It seems to me that using free-licensed music is the simplest solution:
you don't have to pay money,
you don't have to ask permissions,
you don't have to follow silly limitations as how-many-times-did-i-play-this-song-today,
you're complying with the law,
AND (this is very important to me) AUTHORS ARE HAPPY WITH IT. They choose a free license because they are happy with people freely using their music.

I will provide here some free-licensed-music resources links. Follow them, in most cases you also will find a stream URL for these albums. This should make easy their use in SL.
These ones are not direct links to mp3 files: you will have to browse the websites, listen to the music and choose it. That's what DJs usually do before playing music, actually


More than 8000 music albums (electronic, indie, house, rock, industrial and many more):
http://www.archive.org/details/netlabels

Live concerts recordings:
http://www.archive.org/details/etree

Lots of other audio stuff:
http://www.archive.org/details/audio

A list of curators of Creative Commons-licensed content (also music):
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Content_Curators


You may also be interested in the Creative Commons Second Life Salon. Its goal is to build a community in Second Life around Creative Commons licenses and standards through events and projects:
http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Second_Life

I've always forwarded people who ask about royalities and licensing to look at http://www.loudcity.net as people have already mentioned above. They offer licensing to cover Internet radio royalties, licensing costs are fairly low for hobby, low income streams. As Chip says, they do ask that you direct your listeners to a launch page on their site, but thats hard to enforce in SL, more details on their site.

Jamie.
Steaming Live Audio - HQ (Mauve 75,250)

Of course the other issue is SL is international.. Read something like loudcity and you realise than in fact it's US only. I ( as a Brit ) couldn't use it as we have songs launched in the UK that are not available in the US. As such I'd instantly breach that service's T&C plus it's licencing agreements with the US based agencies.

Not to mention I am of course not controlled by the DMCA as it's not a UK regulation and whilst we're streaming THROUGH SL technically it's no different to logging onto a website and the stream auto-streaming. i.e. unlike actual content the fact that SL is US based I don't believe actually matters when it comes to audio streaming as your client ( which is based where you live of course ) just connects direct to the server ( which could be anywhere in the world ) which is streaming the content and thus not clear where the regulation is.

In the UK the body responsible for Licencing is the PRS HOWEVER they do not appear to have caught up with the internet age and as such there is no information available for licencing for a radio station broadcasting over the internet from a UK based PC.

I never looked into all the legal aspects, but from a DJ friend in SL, I gather that while DLing P2P is in of itself "frowned upon" by the RIAA, the playing of songs owned by the DJs in SL is not. The reasoning is that the DJ's are not making money off of thier gigs. And before anyone argues this, "the L$ has no real world value". Until LL commits to saying it does, or some other institution back it up, the L$ has no more value than cerial box tops, so DJ's are not making any money for playing. If they have the CD's/LP's/Tapes/etc of the music in thier possession, they are legal. At this point it's no different than having a party and palying a CD for your friends.

That grey area (or illegal area) comes with the DLing. Though means mentioned above may work to cover licensing through DLing, but that's a whole nother area.

~Jessy

So concerning DJing with P2P, remember acquirng music through P2P is ILLEGAL, as for downling it and playing it immediately, there are some rules about requests, as in your not allowed to play requests from 40 minutes of the initial one, as in, your not a juke box, so if someoen requests a song from Nine Inch Nails, and you download it, and play it as the next song, that's also a no no.

Ummm certainly in the UK I don't believe that's the case, frequently you'll get requests on the radio played immediatly after the requester requests it. (Obviously with a short conversation whilst the previous song was playing ).

Are you sure about that with live365. When we spoke with them they made no mention of that at all and I can't find what you are saying in their TOS.

I see this is still pretty complicated

I don't think you are in the clear just in owning legal copies of the music though. One has to pay royalties wherever music is played in public, even if the place doesn't make money off of the music. I mean, restaraunts and places where the music isn't the attraction of the place still have to pay for that muzak thing, which comes with the licensing pre-handled. Sure you don't have to pay to play yor tunes in your carpool, and the RIAA isn't about to come and bust your house party, but strangers on the internet listening to tunes for free, is not something that can last!

I have a massive collection of netlabel tunes which I tend to play one or two, but people don't show up to hear that stuff, they show up to hear the songs that they know! Which of course begs the question, "why not make them know the cc music?", the nasty chicken and egg problem that comes with all these free licenses, well it would be nice if we lived in that dream world, but we don't and I dont have time to play licensing evangelist, sigh.

I guess there really isnt any way to be in the clear about this aside from payin each licensing agency, which only the richest of land barons has the budget to pull off in SL, if RIAA has its way there would only be like 5 or 6 big straming companies opertain online who could stay in the black after all those licenses, sigh. I dont want a bloody company I just wanted to make some noise without fear of lawsuits. I guess loudcity with the bypassing of the launch page it the best I can do, but it leaves me vulnerable which I don't like.

I wish I were brave enough to just do pirate radio like everyone else.

Therein lies the biggest debate. Technically, using them to stream could be interpreted as the same as playing them from your own home and 'cirtually' throwing a party or 'hanging out'. There is no clear laws at this time for 'virtual' DJing as it is, so it's such a big gray area. Some could argue that earning money from playing the songs would be the defining clause that makes it illegal to play music you actually paid for.

As for restaurants, etc., they usually use a box in the back that tunes into a radio/satellite station. I.E., some businesses pay DirecTV for the business channels to stream out and DirecTV pays the royalties. I cannot stream my DirecTV through to you, but if I paid for the business package, I could.

Some of the music download issues mentioned on this thread are beyond me but there is one theme I could pick up on and that is money.

Personally I would not want to fall into the trap of saying Linden Dollars have no value regardless of the Linden TOS.

Or perhaps to put it another way if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flys like a duck, there is a high possibility it could get treated like one.

For example, if in world or by arrangement on the Lindex I offered anyone of you on this thread the opportunity to buy 500 linden dollars for $1 (real one) you might snatch my virtual arm off. Another example could be I can sell sufficient Linden dollars via Lindex and leave the real US dollars on my account to pay tier, or perhaps buy a private Island from Linden.

I suspect that some of the very large Second Life businesses have elected to pay income/capital gains tax on profits on the basis of legality. I know I would follow that route.

In essence the Linden dollar has a "fungible" monetary value.

Although Desmond Shang has commented much of the technology here is cutting edge and there may not be legal precedents, on the money issue I believe there is ample legislation in place. So in my own opinion that may influence what could be deemed to be legal in terms of paying for music copy write

Just a personal view

Regards John


PS to post. I have raised this issue on the Linden Questions Forum, the link is here.
/139/c0/139675/1.html Be interesting to read a reply

The license that's being discussed here is a special low-cost "internet broadcaster" license, which can be used by small-scale operations who stream music from web sites etc... it's this type of licence that has restrictions on requests, track rotations etc.

Large-scale commercial radio stations have a completely different broadcasting licence, and aren't subject to those restrictions.

BUT it's a US regulation.. there is no such regulation of any sort that I can find on the relevent UK sites.

Not necessarily, simillar regulation exists in the other countires (but I'm not sure where or how they exist...)

Is this issue complicated yes, is there an easy issue no.

As for dealing with the entire TOS issues, understand that although you do own a copy of that song to do what you wish, but once it enters the public realm, as in broadcasting - there are rights and issues that you have to pay for using someone elses copyrighted materials for your own use. Remeber in order to use copyrighted materials for you own use, you must ask for permission, playing licesnsing fees is one of those ways of asking for permission.

Yes, I'm sure. It gets talked about often on the Live365 forums. The only way to have it be legal when listeners are able to initiate the stream without having to launch it from the station page is for pro broadcasters. Pro stations pay annual licensing fees and are responsible for paying their own royalties. Standard Live365 stations where Live pays the fees and royalties for you can only legally be launched from the station page. I'm sure they'd change it if they could but that's their deal under the DMCA. You'll find the specifics in the broadcaster agreement, which is a different page than the TOS. On LoudCity's site it's in their TOS.

Ah, that explains it. We are Pro Broadcasters and pay the premium plus the royalties. Too Legit To Quit..lol ..hehe