14 DAY TRIAL // The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has decided to pick on a site that doesn’t just pay thousands of dollars in license fees, but it also doesn’t make a cent.
The case seems to be related to one recently reported by Torrent Freak, which focused on ReelRadio, a site that’s been around for about two decades and which offers old radio archives for download.
The site pays its licenses and all seemed to be going fine until the RIAA decided to squeeze it for all it had. The Association wants ReelRadio to respect its strict terms, the same terms that would make it drastically reduce its user experience.
PatesTapes.com seems to be in the same trouble with the RIAA. The site is dedicated to mixtape archives created by Charles Pates and it doesn’t really make the RIAA happy even though it pays its licenses and doesn’t even make a dime out of the whole deal.
“The demands are almost exactly the same as what ReelRadio is reporting – remove ‘archived recordings’ after two weeks and ‘archive recordings’ must be longer than five hours. In our case, saying what is in the recording before it plays is a no-no,” said Dennis Wallace from PatesTapes.
While the site doesn’t make any money, it pays ASCAP, BMI and SoundExchange some $5,000 in licensing fees just so it keeps everything legal.
The site itself only has about 200 listeners per day. They can put on a tape and let it automatically go from tape to tape within the same category and thus listen to music for hours.
“We had a meeting and we’ll be trying to revive the site rather than shutting down. We’re moving from a ‘pick your tape’ model to more of a ‘pick you stream’ model, based on a longer set list. We are going to be running this past legal minds so we can be more sure about any subsequent challenge,” Wallace said of their efforts to comply with the RIAA.
Torrent Freak points out that there’s a huge difference in how the RIAA treats file-sharing sites and hobbyist services such as those above. While the former gets to share millions of copyrighted items only to get a mere slap on the wrist, the latter are basically run into the group even if they pay licenses and just try to have some fun with their hobbies.