Overview

There s no getting away from it, the easier digital technology makes it to store, search and distribute creative works at high sound quality, the more fiendishly complicated it makes protecting the intellectual property rights of the creators. This is true for all copyright material that might appear on a web radio site or its streams, but by far the greatest problems are in the arena of popular music. It is invariably the case that legislation follows in the wake of new technologies, where they change the way we do things, and in the ICT ocean the previously serviceable raft of copyright law is having an especially hard time keeping afloat. This uncertain state of affairs should not deter the aspiring webcaster, but it is important to be aware of the potential for finding yourself on the wrong side of some hastily drafted legislation which is attempting to maintain the copyright status quo. Hence this chapter.

The problem is fundamental: the distribution of analogue sound has been easy to police because it had its own natural barriers or points of exchange with the public, whereas in the decentralized world of digital distribution policing copyright becomes extremely difficult and maybe ultimately impossible. Until quite late in the Broadcast Century, music used to exist in one of three clearly definable forms: as live performance, as sheet music or as sound recorded onto some physical medium usually as mass produced singles and LPs on vinyl or analogue cassette. It was relatively...