Right Here, Right Now, I Have To Hear Jesus Jones

While futzing around with "AccuRadio," an Internet music streaming service, I was attempting to customize, as their interface allows, the "Flock of Eighties" stream by "deselecting" from a long list of honored '80s artists who I maybe didn't want to hear so much of (OK, any of) in the stream. I had banished to the outer darkness Peabo and Roberta, Phil Collins (I kept Genesis!), Fine Young Cannibals (they sometimes drive me crazy), the Georgia Satellites (wanted to keep my ears to myself when it came to them), and INXS.

When I tried to add Jesus Jones to my list of anathemas, I got a popup telling me that pursuant to federal copyright law, only limited personalization of the stream was allowed. Five and only five artists could be eliminated from the list. I must admit, this is a new one to me, and while I've often fence-sat on matters of intellectual property rights, any law that dictates this absurdity should be subject to the very strictest scrutiny.

(Note to pedants re: this entry's headline. I know I could just shut off the AccuRadio if I really, really don't want to hear Jesus Jones.)

Comments

[deaf as a stone]

"Standing on the edge of the Hoover Dam..." Damn, I have to hear this, too. You think you got problems.

[Shultz]

My first reaction is that, maybe, they're blaming copyright protection for something that's more akin to a technology or cash problem.

You know, they don't have the manpower or bandwidth or they don't want to spend the money required to give people that level of service.

Five years ago, maybe they would have blamed it on El Nino. Three years ago, maybe they would have blamed it on Al Quaeda. Last year, maybe they would have blamed it on Enron.

This year, it's the RIAA.

P.S. The RIAA sucks.

[Dan]

Perhaps if they allow too much customization, they become classified as a "music download service" rather than a "radio station"? Could be something like that.

[critic]

I got nothing.

[SM]

Brian Doherty tries to censor INXS ! Yet another black mark against Nick Gillespie's regime. This would never have happened during the golden age when Virginia of Postrel reigned !! I invite everyone here to take their custom somewhere else 😉

[critic]

I still got nothing.

[deaf as a stone]

Schultz,

I thought it was supposed to be Ashcroft.

[deaf as a stone]

John, that is. Not Richard.

[Brendan Perez]

MusicMatch radio does something similar. If you skip past too many songs, it tells you that you've reached your mamximum number of skips for the day and says something about contracts with the artists limit the number of times a certain artist can appear each hour. I usually only listen to their comedy genre radio station, so I don't know if it happens on all stations.

One or both tiers of their paid service allows you unlimited song skipping, so I doubt that the limit on the free version is really as much about artist contracts as it is upselling.

[Rick Barton]

New Wave Music, Yes!

Missing Persons, Human League, Blondie, Devo, David Bowie, Kajagoogoo, Gogo's, Softsell, Culture Club, Thompson Twins, Bananarama, A Flock of Seagulls, Gary Numan, Berlin, Vapors, Wall of Voodoo, The Cars, Duran Duran, Modern English, Thomas Dolby, etc, etc, etc. Oh yeah, and Oingo Boingo, a band with some great libertarian songs! I'm listening to "capitalism" as I type this!

The genera seems like a very special phenomenon. It was hyper-creative with lots of appealing style and verve; very fun and the girls were really cute as well!.......Ok, I'll settle down.

[Phil Collins]

Tonight, tonight, tonight, oh wo.
Tonight, tonight, tonight, oh wo.

YOU MIGHT BLOCK ME OFF YOUR INTERNET SERVICE BUT YOU WILL NEVER KEEP ME OUT OF COMMENTS.

Tonight, tonight, tonight, oh wo.

[david bowie]

david bowie = new wave???????

glam rock, baby!!!!!!!!

[Tommy_Grand]

"...The webcasting license we operate under only allows "limited personalization" of our channels. This is why we feel we should only allow listeners to "deselect" a limited number of artists they don't want to hear, rather than allowing listeners to pick specific artists or specific songs they do want to hear...."

Sure. But since when does a limited number = five? What percent of the artists can listeners de-select? No reasonable court/agency could conclude that allowing listeners to de-select, say, 40% of artists within a genre is equivalent to "picking specific artists." Note: if the court/agency is unreasonable, no practice is safe; if no practice is safe, why limit at all?

[Rick Barton]

Yeah, Bowie is old enough that he has sort of stretched thru a few genres.

One time he asked Lennon what he thought of glam rock, and John replied; "It's just Rock&Roll with lip stick"

[Rick Barton]

Any body know what song "Right Here, Right Now..." is from? Brian Doherty; please don't tell. If no one posts it, I will later. Gotta crash now.

Wouldn't it be cool if government was small and we didn't have to fight the welfare/warfare state, so we could just blog about interesting and fun topics? Oh well; the only reason for politics is to put an end to politics (or at least drastically minimize its importance)

[garym]

That sounds to me like a typical excuse for a software limitation. Someone hard-coded an array size of 5, and it's too much trouble to find all the places that would have to be changed. "It's not a bug, it's a legal requirement!"

[kevrob]

There are DMCA restrictions on streaming audio, such that:

"Some of these DMCA rules outline restrictions on the frequency some songs can be played. These are the basic points:

In any 3-hour period, we can webcast:

No more than 3 songs from one album;
no more than 2 played consecutively
No more than 4 songs from a set/compilation;
no more than 3 played consecutively
No more than 4 recorded songs by the same artist
(live studio appearances are okay)" From

http://www.wfuv.org

A broadcast station can play an entire album, because the labels don't fear cassette tapes the way they do a digital copy.

Virginia P. was on to JJ years ago.

http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/fukuyama.html

"When the musical group Jesus Jones hit the pop charts with a 1991 song lauding the post-Cold War joys of "watching the world wake up from history," Fukuyama achieved a cultural penetration few intellectuals--let alone Hegel interpreters--dream of."

Kevin

[Brady]

Brian,

You may have a legit beef with the service to get them to quit playing Jesus Jones on your eighties stream...Jesus Jones didn't have an album released in the US until 1990!!!

Liquidizer

[Equality 7-2521]

Um, it's from a song called "Right Here, Right Now" by Jesus Jones?

[Equality 7-2521]

And please tell me that once you learned of the limit, you replaced INXS with OMD on your block list.

[Pete Guither]

AccuRadio's answer from their web site:

Currently, every Internet radio station in the U.S. must abide by guidelines set forth in the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act), which places certain restrictions on what we can offer our listeners.

The webcasting license we operate under only allows "limited personalization" of our channels. This is why we feel we should only allow listeners to "deselect" a limited number of artists they don't want to hear, rather than allowing listeners to pick specific artists or specific songs they do want to hear. (As far as the law and the copyright holders are concerned, allowing listeners to choose the specific songs they want to hear when they want to hear them, without permission from the copyright holder, would be copyright violation.)...

If you're interested, you can view the text of the DMCA in PDF format here. The section that regulates Internet Radio is listed under Title IV, Sec. 405, "Scope Of Exclusive Rights In Sound Recordings; Ephemeral Recordings" on page 33 of the file.

[Rick Barton]

Equality 7-2521,

Oh, of course. Oops, my bad. When I saw the title my mind went to the Missing Persons' song: "Right Now". I was thinking, a more general 80's ref. Actually, that song (I'm listening to it now) doesn't even contain the lyric; "right here" as I thought it did. Very embarrassed. Good tune though.

[Matt Bruce]

Try launch.yahoo.com - you can blacklist as many artists as you want but they will limit you on song skipping. At least they're up-front about the unlimited song skipping being a premium feature, and they don't blame copyright.

[Douglas Fletcher]

INXS, man that was one annoying band. I think they might even have been more annoying than Duran Duran, but it would be a close contest for sure.

[kevrob]

Tommy, I expect that someone would have to notice the triple-spin before they would report it. Broadcasters who also stream have to keep logs of the songs they play, which could be subject to inspection by ASCAP and/or BMI if not by the Feds. I don't think webcasters have to do this, but conceivably the software that runs the jukebox keeps some kind of log of what it has done, at least temporarily. I suppose one could design a key record for each track and a suitable algorithm such that a non-DMCA-compliant string of songs would not be allowed, but I'm no coder, and would get a headache just trying to count all the necessary variables.

Pavel, as for TiVoish tech for internet radio, since there are PC based alternatives to that, such as Snapstream, that doesn't sound far-fetched. I don't think TPTB would like it too much. One of the things DMCA did was cause webcasters to disable functions on archived programs that allow a listener to fast forward or rewind through a program. If you catch the first hour of a three-hour program, then have to log off, no coming back later and picking up at hour 2. Having the ability to skip through the file to the good parts is verboten. I'd bet removing unloved sounds from on-the-fly listening would be, also.

Kevin

[Pavel]

Interesting. So would software that filtered radio streams and only replayed songs you wanted to hear--TiVo style--be illegal?

Intellectual property law is, perhaps for the time being, a necessary absurdity. However, it's important to note that Good Code has been replicating itself on this planet for about 4 billion years now.

The Digital Millenium will propel the rate of replication expotentially, and there's nothing a Copyright Act is going to do about it.

Take that to the bank and cash it, RIAA.

[Tommy_Grand]

"In any 3-hour period, we can webcast:

No more than 3 songs from one album;
no more than 2 played consecutively
No more than 4 songs from a set/compilation;
no more than 3 played consecutively
No more than 4 recorded songs by the same artist
(live studio appearances are okay)"

So let's say I have access to a digital library of every single rock song recorded from 1955-2003. And I program my broadcast to select music randomly from this massive database. And, at some point, by pure chance, the first three tracks from "Let it Bleed" play within the same three-hour period. Violation?

[Kevin Carson]

Rick Barton,

I usually agree with your posts. But you just HAD to get onto music, didn't you?

I think the '80s suck (except for the genuine punk). Most of that "new wave" was just keyboard and drum machine pop. Worse yet, even the good guitar bands from the '70s were infected by the keyboard pop sound. My God, even ZZ Top went to shit in the mid-80s. Aside from the underground/punk stuff, the entire decade was nothing but keyboard pop and shitty spandex-and-hair metal bands (e.g., anything remotely connected to Sammy Hagar or David Lee Roth).

Thank God Nirvana and Stone Temple Pilots came along. We had a almost a decade of good music, even on Top 40, before Britney and the boy bands plunged us into another age of shit.

[Russ D]

So much for the "accu" part of "AccuRadio".

[Highway]

I know it's not a very constructive comment, but:

Damn, all those restrictions are so stupid! Copyright my ass. That's just out and out bare-faced protectionism. If you've got the privilege of playing the songs, why does playing 3 songs in an hour matter? Sheesh.

Plus, 'Phil' missed the part where Brian KEPT Genesis, which I'd presume would include the song Tonight, Tonight, Tonight. He just wouldn't have to hear 'In the air tonight'.