Royalties paid by non-profit stations

[Doug Alan <nessus@athena.mit.edu>]

I dug into the matter of royalties paid by the college radio station I
worked at and found out that I was indeed partially mistaken.  I was
correct in that the station does *not* pay a per song royalty.
Instead it pays an annual licensing fee to ASCAP and to BMI.  The
annual fee to ASCAP is $150 and the annual fee to BMI is about $250.
These annual fee allows the station to play as much music licensed by
ASCAP and BMI (which covers the vast majority of music on US or
British record companies) as they want.  I have no idea how ASCAP or
BMI then decides whish artists get what share of the money.  The
reason I wasn't aware of these fees is because they are so nominal and
because they are not on a per song basis.  However, my original point
still stands.  For an extremely nominal royalty -- less than half a
cent per song if you average the cost over all the songs played in a
year -- a non-commercial radio station can play a song, or even an
entire album, and potentially millions of people could legally record
the album for free.  Not only is this legal -- but it is the way it
should be!

The same thing is true for a commercial station, except that the
royalties they have to pay are much higher -- several cents per song.

Some software companies are making a big scene about public libaries
having software.  They say that this makes the software too easy to
copy without paying for it.  They want to change the copyright laws to
not allow copyrighted software to be caried in public libraries.  This
is an outrage!  Why do software companies think that they are above
the laws protecting the common good that musicians and authors have
had to live with for ages?

|>oug