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[FYI] How to infuriate the RIAA and stay enragingly legal



http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10452

[Das Micropayment ist wohl das grösste Problem an der Idee
-- Matthias]

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We (OK, you saw through this, me) at Inquirer Labs US propose a new webcasting radio station, or a whole lot of them. This company, dedicated to bringing you the music you want and deserve, the way you want it, would be done in an "all request" format. No programming at the hands of bought and paid for "program directors", simply channels that you the listener make and maintain. Of course, this is not a 1 to 1 thing, no webcast radio station could support the bandwidth, that much is obvious. You simply can make a channel you want, and pick the programming you want from a large selection. Others can tune in, and listen to what you are playing if they want to, or make their own, or both.

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But isn't this sort of streaming illegal? Not if you tithe properly. Won't the bandwidth be rather expensive? Yes, it is, that is why you need to cache the music in various places around the internet, and stream it once to these network edge caches, whereupon they can be streamed out to other local listeners. A good place to have the cache is on the computer of the channel creator/'dj' for each channel, but others can be sub-caches if the channel becomes very popular. If you wanted to go a step further, you could make the song selection stream the music from other local channel owners who have the songs in their cache.

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So overall, you have a custom, caching, webcasting software, that lets the user control what songs they listen to, and better yet pays its dues in a legal way!

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The only downside is that this will be a non-commercial radio station, so in order to pay the RIAA its blood money, it would have to charge a monthly fee to users. Fair enough. If you look at a channel operator in this setup as a "worst case" scenario, and assume they have been in the DJ business for a long time, they might have a 20GB cache of MPx and OGx files built up. Assuming 4MB per song cached, and played 10 times per song cached, you have the following math to do:

.07 cents per song played
Played 10 times per cached copy
4 MB per song
20 GB total cached songs
20,000/4 * .07 = $3.50

I don’t know about you, but if you charge $1 per month per user, you can pay the RIAA their $3.50 per 20 GB downloaded, a 50 cent tip on top of that, and with 35 million users, still have enough to pay the rent. Legally. Cool.

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