Overview

Where the previous chapter concerned itself chiefly with the musical side of web radio and the legalities of copyrights, this one focuses on the spoken word and the messages and information contained therein. (The message can, of course, also encompass song lyrics, banned in one country or another.) It may be easy to imagine living in a liberal democratic country that web radio stations have nothing to worry about in this regard. It is certainly a very much freer environment than terrestrial broadcasting, but the history of the mass media tells us that free speech is a not a right we can ever take for granted.

If copyright law is difficult to formulate and police on a global network, how much more complicated a matter is it for media regulators to apply their own internal broadcasting laws to this international soapbox? For, however else we describe it, anything that is printed, pictured or spoken on the World Wide Web is a form of publication by most legal definitions, and as such web radio streams and pages are already subject, in theory at least, to individual nations laws and broadcasting regulations. The effectiveness of those laws and regulations in this new environment is just beginning to be tested in courtrooms around the world.

Sitting at home, listening to or eavesdropping on, might be another way of putting it a voice which is actually talking live to an audience in their homes or cars 10 000 miles...