The world of internet radio stations won an important battle (at least I think it was important) the other day when a judge ruled against Sony’s attempt to collect royalties from Yahoo!’s Launchcast.  As I understand it, there are two levels of payments for using copyrighted material on “networks.”  One is the collecting of royalties where a broadcaster has to pay a fee directly to the holder for every time a song is played.  The other is the payment of licensing fees to an umbrella organization that parcels out payments to the artists according to a complicated formula.

A regular radio station pays licensing fees, a flat rate determined by size of audience, genre, etc., and plays as much of whatever they want.  A downloading service (for example) pays a royalty directly to the artist’s agent for every individual sale of a recording.  Over the past few years you have no doubt read some items about people downloading popular songs without paying these royalties and the record companies filing legal claims against them.

Caught in the middle were the internet “radio” stations that function just like the over-the-air stations and “broadcast” programming in much the same format.  These internet stations were threatened with early extinction when the recording companies attempted to extract royalties from them.  Most of these stations are operated by one person from their home, usually without any advertising or other source of income, and a sudden demand for $250,000 in royalty payments had them shutting down and leaving millions of listeners with limited choices.

Gradually, the internet network aggregators have been winning in court in their attempt to stay in business and this week’s decision was one that will probably, in my opinion, finish this attempt by the record companies to extract as much money as they can from the “little guy” who plays their music.

TG Daily is reporting HERE that Yahoo!’s Launchcast internet radio service shouldn’t have to pay royalties for the songs that it plays:

Yahoo will only be liable to pay licensing fees to SoundExchange, the organization that collects royalties for musicians.

The case dates back to 2001, with a ruling in Yahoo’s favour in 2007, but Sony appealed.

The appeal court judges accepted Yahoo’s argument that Launchcast didn’t give users enough controls for the service to be considered interactive, the deciding factor in whether royalties were due.

Launchcast allows users to create a personalized ‘radio station’, playing their favourite musical genres. But, said judge Richard Wesley, “This degree of control is no different from a traditional radio listener expressing a preference for a country music station over a classic rock station.”

The recording industry has been hurting big-time the past several years as you may have noticed.  All the big record stores have shuttered and even the little ones are almost completely gone as people have switched to the internet to both purchase their CD’s and download individual recordings.

The next format to fall will be the traditional “terrestrial” radio stations, both AM and FM bands.  Myself, I don’t ever listen to the radio anymore and I haven’t for years.  There’s nothing much to listen to on there, for one thing.  If I’m in my car and want to have something coming out of my speakers, I put in a CD.  Usually it’s one that I’ve made myself that’s a compilation of some of my favorite tunes.  The radio stations seem to be 80% advertising and who wants to listen to a 5-minute stream of those irritating, noisy things?  Once these satellite broadcasters get their business models worked out, or someone comes up with an economical way to grab internet signals in a moving automobile, the already-dead terrestrial radio industry will dry up completely.  Sez Firegeezer.

Hey, we’d better get this equipment checked out now.  I’ve got to get some more coffee started.  We’ll meet back in the day room in a little while.

Well, we’re heading into the last week of August, but because of the unusually late Labor Day holiday this year we’ve got two more weeks of “summer.”  And this is when the prices drop on the beach getaways if you want to frolic in the surf.   With the tightened personal budgets this summer, all sorts of resorts and packaged tours are hurting for business, so they’re cutting prices accordingly.

GeezerDotter’s family and another family went together on a deal earlier this week and nabbed a classy 6-bedroom beach home in the Outer Banks for a 30% discount.  So they all headed down there yesterday for a week of sunburn and swimming.  They passed Hurricane Bill along the way, so maybe they got to see that 20-ft. high surf yesterday.  I was down there once when a big storm came through (far from being tropical storm-level, though) and it’s quite impressive.  To watch the surf, I had to stand on the dune with my back to the 40-mph-wind and then turn around for one or two seconds facing into the blinding spray and then turn back for a breather.  But I think our crew isn’t having the big winds this weekend, just the high surf coming in from the distant storm that was several hundred miles away.

I just checked the Outer Banks Live Webcams webpage HERE and I see that things are back to normal there.  So while they’re sleeping in and getting ready for a day of leisure, I think we’d better get ready for a day of other people’s problems and get this equipment checked out.  I’ll go get some more coffee started.

Speaking of coffee, we’ve been getting some fine photos of the GeezerCups in service (such as these HERE and HERE) and we’ll be posting them periodically.  So make sure that you send us a pic of your Firegeezer coffee mug in action.

Click HERE to order yours

There’s some good news from Anchorage.  You’ll recall that I told you Thursday morning about the Pioneer Peak Hotshot wildfire crew who returned from their 2-week deployment and found their headquarters broken into.  If you missed the story and video, CLICK HERE and catch up with what we’re talking about this morning.  It happens that the building is also home to the Gannett Glacier Hotshots and they got home the next day amidst the wreckage and thievery.

But the Alaska State Police got one of those lucky breaks that is often generated by the stupidity of the criminals involved.  While the crews were still out working the fire lines last Sunday, a Kenai policeman pulled over a pickup truck for speeding and subsequently arrested the driver for a suspended license.  When the information on the stolen vehicles at the hotshots office was put into the computer, that speeding pickup truck from Sunday scored a hit with one of the missing trucks.

The two men that were in the pickup on Sunday have now been arrested and charged with 1st-degree vehicle theft and possession of stolen property.  But that’s a big break because now it’s only a matter of time until the investigators track back who these clowns have been with while all this vandalism was going on.  So far, three of the five stolen vehicles have been recovered.  KTUU-TV has this report and an updated video about it HERE.

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Yesterday we linked to STATter911′s story on the Oklahoma City fire station that had a major fire of its own Thursday.  Our chief Oklahoma correspondent Todd H. forwarded this raw video taken from Channel 9′s helicopter of the fire:

One of the reports from another news source there had said that the FD said the station would have to be demolished and rebuilt.  I think that reporter might have misunderstood what they were talking about because it looks to me from these views that the building seems to be doing ok.  Perhaps some of the roof trusses will need replacing and certainly the roof.  But apparently the living quarters took quite a hit.  The company was out on a call when it started and they discovered the fire when they came back to the station.

While you’re checking out the equipment now, I’ll go make sure that the plug for Bunn-O-Matic is safe and servicable.  I’ll see you back in the day room in a little while.

Wow, where did the week go?  Here it is Friday already and I’m still trying to catch up on Tuesday’s emails.  It’s too hot to go play outside, so I’m trying to get some overdue computer tasks done.  Primarily I’m wanting to back up a lot of files to discs (or is it “disks”?) that I can’t afford to lose.

During the course of my skimming through the internet and reading up on fire/rescue related stories, I saw an article the other day about some people complaining about having to wait a long time for a helicopter ambulance to arrive at a wreck.  The crash happened on a rural road out in the middle of nowhere – and I mean NO…. WHERE -  and yet an ambulance was there within a reasonable time, about 10 minutes I think.  But after calling for the air unit, the helicopter didn’t arrive until 24 minutes after the initial 9-1-1 call was made.  And those silly yay-hoos were complaining.

But this is symptiomatic of a generation that has been raised watching television all their lives and they think that all crimes are solved in less than 60 minutes and an air ambulance should be landing at the crash site within 45 seconds after you call for one.  Yes, there are some people out there who think that movies and tv shows depict real life accurately.

That got me to thinking, it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of reactions will be coming from these people who live in the cities where firehouses are being shut down and the rural areas where entire rescue squads are closing up shop for lack of EMT’s.  As these declines in service become more prevelant and the publicity generated by the shutdowns make people more aware, we can expect to hear some more pushback coming from the citizens.  Even the ones like those in my first example who complain when service is great, but don’t know what to expect in the first place.  Not long ago, people would marvel at the fact a helicopter was coming in the first place.  Now they’re upset that it isn’t constantly hovering around overhead just in case something bad happens on the highway.

It’s all a set of complicated, intertwining circumstances that got us to this point.  And we’re not going to correct it anytime soon.  Just make sure that you’re aware of these possibilities and have a nice way of directing these unhappy voters to the councilman’s or supervisor’s office who are the source of their discontent.  And they’re probably not in their office on Fridays.

But we are, so let’s get the equipment checked out this morning.  I’m going to get the coffee started now.