Death knell for college broadcasting? Web fees threaten to shut down school stations - Update

University Business, Nov, 2002 by Tim Goral

They're tiny, underfunded, and often eclectic in taste level and delivery, but a college radio station may be as much a part of an IHE's identity as the football team. Yet, because of new copyright fees, many stations that reach worldwide audiences via the Internet could go silent. The fees, which were reported this summer, are a result of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and are retroactive to that year. That means small campus stations all across the country could owe thousands of dollars, bankrupting their already meager operating budgets.

Rather than fight the ruling, many stations have, indeed, opted to pull the plug, says Will Robedee, general manager of WKTRU at Rice University (TX). (Robedee operates a grassroots Web site called Save Our Stream (www.rice.edu/cb/sos), created to speak out for broadcasters.) In fact, some reports say that as many as 200 stations have stopped broadcasting. "That's probably a realistic number," Robedee told University Business. "Since September 1, the pace of stations shutting down has picked up. The SOS Web site lists over 70 stations that have ceased operations, but I know there are many more. There are also stations that never got off the ground because they saw what was coming with the DMCA. That means a lot of lost educational opportunities."

In addition, as determined by the U.S. Copyright Office, stations must also provide extensive reports of each song they play. The new rules call for stations to report total number of performances of each song, in a given period. "The record-keeping requirements are a huge problem because the DMCA rate specifies a performance as the number of listeners per song," says Robedee. "In a live broadcast situation, I know of no method of determining a per-song, per-listener count."

What's more, stations have been given new guidelines about what they play. "Under the DMCA, a station can't play three songs from one recording in a three-hour period, and no more than two in a row," says Robedee. "And in a three-hour period, the can't play more than four songs from one artist, and no more than three in row from a boxed set."

The DMCA rules don't affect a station's FCC license, so college stations could move back to that medium. But because many began on low-power, poor-quality AM frequencies, they channeled the brunt of their resources into the Web. "Once they discovered Web-casting, they abandoned AM equipment," says Robedee. "Now they'll spend more money than they spent on Web-casting to fix up the AM equipment. The result is that they'll have poorer quality and a limited audience. For other stations, such as UCLA radio, the Web is all they have; if the Web goes away--which it did for UCLA--there is no station. The impact there is huge."