I was reading the story that NY Times ran on Pandora and the impact of Copyright Royalty Board’s royalty rate increase. I predict that the Internet Radio Equality Act will die in the House. There is just too large of a gap between politicians and Internet users. Don’t believe me?
…Ask Senator Ted Stevens. Alright, I’ll keep off the Series of Tubes meme…
Never fear. Restrictions like this force innovation. It happened with Napster, Suprnova, and now Internet Radio. Well, if you were a good musical thief, you should have gigs and gigs of music to share with other people. Winamp (has finally) caught up to making it easy to remotely broadcast over your broadband connection with Winamp Remote. This allows you to listen to your collection of music for free via the internet. The caveat is that its intended for single-use.
Setup your own online radio station (albeit soon to be illegal) with Shoutcast. You can queue up all your music and let listeners find you. This takes a little more skill to setup and more bandwidth to run, but hell, go for it. At least you are fighting for your digital freedom.
Now, if that isn’t for you, you can try downloading music of course from Limewire (Gnutella network). The only thing there, is that you run the risk of getting a ‘DMCA Takedown Notice’ and possible termination from your provider. You are essentially biting the hand that feeds your downloading if you go that route.
Finally, you can also go old school with burning it and trading it with friends. The updated way of doing this so it doesn’t look like you’re a birdman, is to lend your iPod to a buddy and load songs with iTunes. It’s fast, friendly and is somewhat cool.
Anyhow the purpose of my semi-educational/mischievous entry today is that no matter what restrictions are placed, the average person can still circumvent them. This is the Windows Genuine Advantage of Internet Radio, it will slow it down but not eliminate it. I mean, it was only hours until WGA was bypassed. We don’t need to panic.
Leave me your reactions to this, as I compare prices on DVD-Rs. 😉
