[KFCF Friends] Tuesday June 26th - The Day of Silence

[KFCF Subscribers & Friends list]

THE DAY of SILENCE
On Tuesday June 26th , KFCF will turn off its' Internet stream and 
archives in solidarity with thousands of Internet broadcasters to 
protest the July 15th cost increases and data reporting changes.  The 
future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for 
webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are 
due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!).

To protest these rates and encourage you to take action and contact your 
Congressional representatives, we are taking part in the Day of Silence, 
by silencing our programming for one day.   We ask that you excuse the 
interruption of our normal programming, and ask that you take action to 
help ensure this silence is not permanent. Please call your 
Congressional Representatives today. Click the link below for 
instructions how. Thank you.

*What's this all about?:* On July 15th, royalty payments for webcast 
music will increase by as much as 1200%. This outrageous and unfair 
ruling will result in many webcasters owing music royalty fees that are 
more than their yearly budget! Because of this, many popular Internet 
radio services will shut down.

Non-commercial stations, like KFCF, must pay the commercial royalty rate 
once a certain amount of online listeners tune in. KFCF may have to 
limit the amount of online listeners we have.

Even worse are the draconian data reporting requirements, that say we 
have to report data about every piece of music we play and how many 
people were listening to it.  KFCF gets programming from KPFA, 
satellite, CDs, vinyl, iPods,78s, cassettes and other sources. Being 
required to track down the song, artist title, album name, ISRC code, LP 
number and other information for every cut would require us to hire 
multiple full time staff to comply. In the past we had the option of 
paying $25 in lieu of reporting the data, but that option is now gone. 
If we have to report this data we will be forced to turn off our 
Internet streams and archives.
*What You Can Do:*
*
1. Contact your Representatives:*
The Internet Radio Equality Act has been introduced in Congress to 
address the webcast royalty issue. Use the online form at 
saveinternetradio.org to find the phone numbers of your Congressional 
Representatives. Pressure from constituents seems to be working - The 
IREA now has over 100 Congressional co-sponsors. Contact Diane 
Fienstein, Barabra Boxer, Jim Costa, George Radanovich and Devin Nunes 
today!!!
*
2. Share:*
This is not a fringe issue: At least 50 million Americans listen to 
Internet radio each month!
Join KFCF's mailing list (see www.kfcf.org for details)to stay up to 
date on issues that affect media freedom.

*3. Support:*
Listener-sponsored KFCF can't continue our work without your help! If 
you haven't become a member, please do so today!

"In this case, 'silence' is an extremely appropriate metaphor, since 
silence may be what listeners hear from most webcasters starting on July 
16th," says Kurt Hanson  publisher of RAIN: Radio And Internet 
Newsletter (www.kurthanson.com), one of the event's organizers. Hanson 
is also founder of AccuRadio.

Major webcasters like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora.com will 
silence their streams along with other Day of Silence participants like 
KCRW.org, Live365, MTV Online, Radioio, RadioParadise, KPFA, KFCF and 
AccuRadio .

Many webcasters are planning to shut off access to their streams 
entirely, while other webcasters plan to replace their music streams 
with long periods of silence (or static or ocean sounds or similar) 
interspersed with occasional brief public service announcements on the 
subject.

This "Day of Silence" is an encore of a successful media event initiated 
by RAIN and organized by small webcasters on May 1, 2002 in response to 
a similarly royalty rate ruling from a Copyright Arbitration Royalty 
Panel (CARP) five years ago. That event garnered national attention and 
was subsequently followed by a rate cut by the Librarian of Congress and 
the passage of the Small Webcaster Settlement Act for the period 1998-2005.

Please take a few moments and contact your congresspeople and let them 
know you support Internet broadcasting. We want to continue streaming , 
paying reasonable rates to the artists, not the ridiculous fees the 
greedy RIAA/Record Companies are demanding. This will affect not only 
KPFA and KFCF, but other valley public broadcasters like KFSR, KVPR and 
Radio Bilingue.

Thanks.

Rych Withers
President KFCF/Fresno Free College Foundation






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