The Day of Silence

Starting at midnight June 26th , KFCF will turn off its Internet stream and archives in solidarity with thousands of Internet broadcasters to protest the July 15th cost increases and data reporting changes. The future of Internet radio is in immediate danger. Royalty rates for webcasters have been drastically increased by a recent ruling and are due to go into effect on July 15 (retroactive to Jan 1, 2006!).

To protest these rates and encourage you to take action and contact your Congressional representatives, we are taking part in the Day of Silence, by silencing our programming for one day. We ask that you excuse the interruption of our normal programming, and ask that you take action to help ensure this silence is not permanent. Please call your Congressional Representatives today. Click the link below for instructions how. Thank you.

http://www.savenetradio.org

What's this all about?: On July 15th, royalty payments for webcast music will increase by as much as 1200%. This outrageous and unfair ruling will result in many webcasters owing music royalty fees that are more than their yearly budget! Because of this, many popular Internet radio services will shut down.

Non-commercial stations, like KFCF, must pay the commercial royalty rate once a certain amount of online listeners tune in. KFCF may have to limit the amount of online listeners we have.

Even worse are the draconian data reporting requirements, that say we have to report data about every piece of music we play and how many people were listening to it. KFCF gets programming from KPFA, satellite, CDs, vinyl, iPods,78s, cassettes and other sources. Being required to track down the song, artist title, album name, ISRC code, LP number and other information for every cut would require us to hire multiple full time staff to comply. In the past we had the option of paying $25 in lieu of reporting the data, but that option is now gone. If we have to report this data we may be forced to turn off our Internet streams and archives.

What You Can Do:

1. Contact your Representatives:
The Internet Radio Equality Act has been introduced in Congress to address the webcast royalty issue. Use the online form at saveinternetradio.org to find the phone numbers of your Congressional Representatives. Pressure from constituents seems to be working - The IREA now has over 100 Congressional co-sponsors. Contact Diane Fienstein, Barabra Boxer, Jim Costa, George Radanovich and Devin Nunes today!!!

2. Share:
This is not a fringe issue: At least 50 million Americans listen to Internet radio each month!
Join KFCF's mailing list (see www.kfcf.org for details)to stay up to date on issues that affect media freedom.

3. Support:
Listener-sponsored KFCF can't continue our work without your help! If you haven't become a member, please do so today!

"In this case, 'silence' is an extremely appropriate metaphor, since silence may be what listeners hear from most webcasters starting on July 16th," says Kurt Hanson publisher of RAIN: Radio And Internet Newsletter (www.kurthanson.com), one of the event's organizers. Hanson is also founder of AccuRadio.

Major webcasters like Yahoo! Launch, Rhapsody, and Pandora.com will silence their streams along with other Day of Silence participants like KCRW.org, Live365, MTV Online, Radioio, RadioParadise, KPFA, KFCF and AccuRadio .

Many webcasters are planning to shut off access to their streams entirely, while other webcasters plan to replace their music streams with long periods of silence (or static or ocean sounds or similar) interspersed with occasional brief public service announcements on the subject.

This "Day of Silence" is an encore of a successful media event initiated by RAIN and organized by small webcasters on May 1, 2002 in response to a similarly royalty rate ruling from a Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (CARP) five years ago. That event garnered national attention and was subsequently followed by a rate cut by the Librarian of Congress and the passage of the Small Webcaster Settlement Act for the period 1998-2005.

Please take a few moments and contact your congresspeople and let them know you support Internet broadcasting. We want to continue streaming , paying reasonable rates to the artists, not the ridiculous fees the RIAA/Record Companies are demanding. This will affect not only KPFA and KFCF, but other valley public broadcasters like KFSR, KVPR and Radio Bilingue.

Thanks,
Rych Withers
President Fresno Free College Foundation / KFCF 88.1 FM