We mentioned last week the formation of a new Webcaster Alliance. The organization has now issued a position paper in the form of a history of HR 5469:

As the lame duck legislative session begins today, the webcasting community continues the fight to keep HR 5469 from passing in the Senate and becoming law.

A year that started with the webcasting industry united in a common goal to work on the CARP (Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel) rates and develop reasonable, equitable legislation as an industry standard has ended with the entire U.S.-based webcasting community up in arms over a private deal negotiated between the RIAA (Recording Industry Artists of America) and VOW (Voice of Webcasters).

"There is nothing wrong with a group of individual webcasters sitting down at the table to negotiate a deal with the RIAA," said Ann Gabriel, President of Webcaster Alliance and CEO of Las Vegas-based Gabriel Media Inc. "Certainly they were entitled to try and seek relief from the October 20th retroactive rates deadline and were within their rights to do so. But when a private negotiation ends up being written into language for a Bill and then forced as a yolk around the neck of an entire industry which had no say in the matter, there is something terribly wrong with our legislative process."

The webcasting industry at large watched in horror as an amended HR 5469 was passed through the House in early October. When initially introduced in late September by Congressman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), the one-paragraph Bill called for a 6-month stay in the imposed royalty rates collection on music broadcast over the Internet. The original version of 5469 was circulated, widely accepted and approved by both webcasters and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), which represents terrestrial Radio stations.

But before HR 5469 could be introduced on the House floor, the RIAA yelled foul, brought in the AFL-CIO to scuttle it and Sensenbrenner pulled it from the "rules suspension" session. Congressman Sensenbrenner then demanded the RIAA and VOW negotiate a deal. That privately negotiated deal then became the language of a new HR 5469, which ballooned into a 30-plus page piece of legislation considered by most in the webcasting industry to be a legal nightmare.

Gabriel and members of the Webcaster Alliance have spent the last several weeks producing an in-depth, multi-part series that covers the events surrounding HR 5469. The series explores the people, technologies, laws and events that led up to the introduction of HR 5469, and the division it caused within the webcasting community.

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