Soon, downloading an entire song from a Web site may cost money - at least 7 cents in royalties to the performer, according to a joint petition filed today to the US Copyright Office by the Recording Industry Association of America, the National Music Publishers' Association, the Songwriters Guild of America, and several other groups.
The proposal, which could take effect as early as January, is the first time that the standard royalty rate for a "mechanical" (a word used initially to describe copies on songs made on piano rolls) has been applied to the digital transmission of music online. Edward Murphy, the CEO of the National Music Publishers' Association, said the rate would apply, say, to "somebody who wants to make their own version of 'White Christmas' as a MIDI file," and upload it to the Net.
Promotional use of song excerpts up to 30 seconds would be exempt. The proposed policy is less clear when an entire copy of the song is not downloaded to the listener's hard drive, as when using streaming technologies like RealAudio, Murphy said. "People will need to investigate that more," he admitted.
Murphy said his group is negotiating with several major online services and ISPs to determine how the royalty payments will be tracked online. One of the technologies that the National Music Publishers' Association is examining closely, Murphy said, is digital "watermarking" - the inclusion of telltale bits in the datastream that reveal the original source of the file.
In the swiftly changing universe of audio delivery on the Net, "the technology has moved forward sufficiently that we all think it's doable," Murphy said, welcoming the proposal as "a clarification of something that's existed for a while." (The US Copyright Office determined in 1995 that digital copies should be considered "mechanicals.")
The proposal also includes an increase in royalty rates for offline delivery of music that may result in a boost in income totaling "hundreds of millions of dollars" for songwriters and music publishers, Variety reported. The current standard rate of 6.95 cents per play will be hiked to 7.1 cents in January, with a similar increase every two years. That rate structure will be in place until 2007.
Because conditions and technologies on the Net are evolving so fast, however, the rate for digital transmissions will be re-examined in 1999.
"This is such a new marketplace, it's not even a marketplace just yet," observed Margaret Drum of the National Music Publishers' Association. "We're all feeling our way on the digital end of things."
