internet radio - broadcast without incurring royalty fees

[Adam Back]

Re. the recent rapacious "broadcast" royalties imposed on internet
radio in the US, it occurs to me it wouldn't be that hard to do the
following and it would probably avoid the royalties even under the
current imbalanced IP laws:

- have the station broadcast it's own content (commentary)
- have the station broadcast song titles, song authors, CDDB serial numbers

- the user would use third-party software capable of playing the
recommended track, such as:

- coincidentally owning the CD and having the CD in a CD jukebox
- owning (or not) the CD and having a mp3 rip of the track on hard
  disk
- queueing the track for download via kazaa

examples of the last are the morpheus plugin for winamp (I think it
was morpheus that had such a plugin -- though it is probably no longer
supported with the morpheus protocol switch).

For performance reasons the station could even pre-queue the tracks
during their commentary and then trigger the start of play after the
track has had some time to be selected by the jukebox / streaming
buffer fill from kazaa.

Seems to me this would pass current IP laws because it is like a radio
station which broadcast the name of a song and the user is expected to
insert the CD in his player and play along to keep up with the
commentary, only automated and with open APIs for the "load and play
this CD track" instructions so people can hook it up to whatever is
convenient to them.

Adam