Closing Pandora's Box: The End of Internet Radio?

ld13

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Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling in the USA and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006).
The http://www.pandora.com/ Music Service had to block all international access (Excluding USA & UK) because of this and because of "licensing constraints".

http://www.10zenmonkeys.com/2007/05/03/closing-pandoras-box-the-end-of-internet-radio/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6619919.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6562823.stm

:mad:
 
Frigin idiots! There will be a bypass... somewhere by somebody... They just force folks to go illegal.
 
Does this only affect radio stations that are webcasting exclusively i.e. no FM/AM/DAB broadcasting?
 
grrr... this is so lame :(

i discovered a lot of good music with pandora. i eagerly await the work around
 
Does this only affect radio stations that are webcasting exclusively i.e. no FM/AM/DAB broadcasting?

AFAIK this only affects Internet radio stations broadcasting from the USA. I'll find the website explaining it in detail again somewhere.

Yes there are workarounds, but the PHProxy I used worked only partially. :confused: The website loads as it usually was suppose to load, only now via the PHProxy. As the Java Pandora player is loading, suddenly at about halfway, the browser closes the connection to the PHProxy, and opens a Direct link to he Pandora.com website. Then a message appears over the Player: “We're having unexpected technical difficulties. Our engineers are scrambling to fix things. Please try again later.” But I’m going try CGI:Proxy and a normal Proxy still. Lets hope Something works at least cause Pandora was a Great service.:mad:
 
This explains it more properly:
Although its quite heartbreaking
http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/
May 03, 2007
Breaking Pandora's Heart...

Dear Listeners -

Tonight we began the heartbreaking process of blocking access to Pandora for listeners outside the U.S.

It's hard to think of anything more anathema to who we are than turning off someone's radio, but the current legal realities leave us no choice. While the DMCA provides us a blanket license in the U.S., there is no equivalent in other countries. After a year of work, only the UK and Canada have shown enough progress for us to feel comfortable allowing continued access.

For those of you around the world who received our early warning emails, thanks so much for your kind and understanding replies... humbling. It really means a lot to us (even though it makes it doubly hard to do...)

Trust that we will continue working as hard as we can to obtain the licenses we need, and to push for the establishment of effective, centralized licensing bodies around the world. Hopefully this kind of development will add some urgency to the need for reform in the administration of worldwide copyrights.

We will all eagerly await the day when we can turn this back on, so please stay close. To quote our CTO, Tom Conrad: "we'll take good care of your stations in the meantime."

Keep the faith...

Tim (Founder)
:o
Much to our chagrin, on the heels of our being forced to block virtually our entire international listening audience, we now have to add Canada to the list (beginning May 16th). We had been hopeful that the licensing situation with our Northern friends might have some hope of imminent resolution. However, after a tough week, and in the wake of the substantial attention the blocking has clearly brought to this issue, it's been made clear to us that we cannot continue streaming into Canada.

No need to reiterate just how difficult this is. It's just a terrible thing for music that there's not even a licensing structure available that would allow a webcaster to stream legally outside the U.S
:eek:
LoL, seems were not the only country with problems with the word 'imminent'
 
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