So if the stream from one Internet radio station keeps breaking up, you switch to another one.  If that second choice happens to be from a service that belongs to the same corporation as your ISP… well, isn’t that just peachy?

Much of Scott Cleland’s defense centered on both the legality of competition in a free market and also that user choice would prevent companies from doing anything so stupid as to prevent their customers from accessing certain pages.  There may be some legitimacy to ideas that companies that don’t provide the direct services, like Google, Microsoft, and others, should have to pay for their greater use of bandwidth.  (Though advocates of these open market might hurt their cause through creepy websites like Don’t Regulate)

The problem, as Gigi Sohn articulated, was that if legislation changed so that companies could control the speed of information at their discretion, there would be less question of whether or not they should.  And that potentially slippery slope could be avoided with a clarification of the legal protection of neutral networks. 

The basic idea was best put by Bertis Downs, who is the manager of R.E.M. “We’re trying to create policies to make sure that those who control the distribution pipelines don’t control the content that goes through them.”  Hard to argue with that.

Panel 3 - Stocking the Celestial Jukebox

With any discussion of music and copyright, there are a handful of acronyms that come to bear: ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers), BMI (Broadcast Music, Inc.), NMPA (the National Music Publishers’ Association), and HFA (the Harry Fox Agency).  These guys are the ones who manage the various rights and regulations on music, and who collect the royalties paid by the broadcasters or distributors of the music.   

Though they are not-for-profit agencies, their mission is to collect the largest amount of money owed for the products they are responsible for.  This money largely goes to the artists, which is a beneficent enough goal.   But as was discussed in the first panel, that may not always be a good thing. There are a lot of problems facing smaller broadcasters right now, compounded by the confusing nature of copyright classifications come into play.  For royalty purposes, music is divided into two categories – broadcast and distributed music.  As it is now, that’s the line between what you hear on the radio, and the stuff you buy in a store.  It would seem like this should be pretty simple to apply to Internet technology – streaming, the stuff you hear but can’t keep, is broadcast, and downloads, the stuff you hear and can keep, is distributed. 

But technicalities complicate the issue.  With streaming, small packets of information are downloaded to the computer to make the stream flow more easily.  This also makes it so that it could be defined as both broadcast and distributed, and makes the broadcaster liable to pay a whole host of different organizations.  Similarly with downloading, the music is received over a period of time, and could be considered a broadcast.