Licensing,
Royalities and other Legal Stuff
Here are
some facts about licensing, royalities and other legal stuff:
In September 2000 five copyright societies met in Santiago, Chile, and
signed a number of separate biateral agreements in an attempt to simplify
the licensing issues surrounding the public performance of music used
online. The group assembled at the CISAC (International Confederation
of Societies of Authors and Composers) World Congress and set forth
to ease some of the issues that have plagued music distribution over
the Internet. The U.S. organization BMI (Broadcast Music Inc.), Holland's
BUMA, Germany's GEMA, the U.K.'s PRS (Performing Right Society) and
France's SACEM entered into an agreement that permits each group to
grant licenses for online music use on a global scale.
Because of the Santiago Agreement and the worldwide royality laws, we
are not allowed to take care about your licensing fees. This would only
be possible if your stream is exclusively available (can be activated)
on our website as a sort of additional channel of our own radio station.
This is a trick some radio directories/ providers use. But as soon as
you directly link to your own stream on your own website (which almost
all webcasters do), you will have to pay licensing fees in your country
as well. Directly linking either means that a player will be activated
or a player popup opens. So a 3rd party popup player is no workaround.
All this is based on the international santiago agreement.
Generally
radio directories with direct links to radio streams have to pay licensing
fees. They pay for their own website. They do not pay for your website!
Not the stream is significant. The location where the stream is presented
is! Some radio directories/providers do not tell you this at all and
some have small parts in their legal agreements which handle this issue.
Anyway, we at the DRS 2006 Radio Streamer have decided to provide a
professional streaming service. This means we do not have thousands
of banners in popup players and we do not interrupt your streams to
bring any commercials.
Therefore we do not have any direct links to the streams of our clients
on our websites.
You as the client can broadcast anything you want to, because you are
responsible for your own content. You are not seen as a radio channel
of our website or own radio.
Beside
that we do not monitor the stream contents and we are not responsible
for the behavior of our clients or users, or for the shows they webcast.
The content and any copyright/royalty fees and any other possible issues
are the sole responsibility of the individual hosts and their production
entities. DRS Systemtechnik and/or its staff will be held blameless
and be recognized as nothing more than a service provider. Please also
read our legal disclaimer.
With this information we want to help you to be legal and professional.
Not more and not less. How you finally handle this is up to you. Anyway
here are a few international links about licensing your station in your
country:
