live365 tries to stamp out streamripper
Insatiable demand for digital music is creating a new battleground. Recent moves by live365 indicate that the record labels, fresh from their victory over Napster, could turn their attention to the young internet radio community.



DJ Ari is 21 years old, and when not studying for his finals and working full-time runs arguably the most popular entirely internet-based radio station in the US.

Stephen "Tag" Loomis has, through his employer, access to more bandwidth than god.

Jon Clegg wrote an as yet little known software plugin for the MP3 player winamp that indirectly may have got his fathers radio station shut down.

Tagstrance.com is run as a hobby by Tag, a founder of Nullsoft which was bought by AOL a couple of years ago. Like Ari's production, DigitallyImported.com, tagstrance relies on vast quantities of free bandwidth to remain in business. While struggling to get his DSL distance challenged home onto broadband, Tag pumps out hundreds of ad-free simultaneous dance streams to broadband-equipped friends and strangers at near CD quality.

Supporting over 2500 listeners listening to trance, eurohouse and classical at high quality, Digitally Imported fills two OC3s (a single OC3 is about 155mbit of capacity).

Eating bandwidth like this would cost an e-commerce company such as Amazon over $100,000 a month to buy wholesale, or could be cut and re-cut in purity until it fetches perhaps a couple of million dollars a month on the street when sold down to dialup subscribers.

Digitally Imported has, as yet, no revenue. A brief experiment with mico-paying banner ads was canceled recently and no adverts go out onto the stream. Ari uses his own wages to pay for needed equipment, and in the spirit of listener supported radio, the station has an occasional fund raising drive when a new disk, or sound card is needed.

How does a station grow to be the size of DI when faced with such a huge expense? enter the "dotcom" live365.com. Micro-broadcasters rely on live365 to pay for their bandwidth.. in turn, live365 has the option of running adverts over their streams in order to try to turn a profit.

DI split from live365 a while ago, taking over half their total listeners with him, but thanks to the interest of AOL backed Nullsoft, and the 23 year old CTO at Intellispace, he has enough free bandwidth to cope with demand.

DARK FIBER EVERYWHERE, BUT BANDWIDTH IS TOO EXPENSIVE

At a hundred grand a month for an audience base of maybe 100,000 unique listeners clearly Ari is not going to get rich. Worse, this cost, unlike traditional radio, is also variable .. the more listeners, the more his expense, it is clear that the advertising supported radio model does not yet translate to the internet.

One way forward for DI and stations like it is to use ISPs as a relay, keeping expensive internet backbone bandwidth costs to a minimum. Unfortunately shellshocked broadband ISPs are not ready for this step right now: "once we have our own streaming service in place we will consider selectively relaying other webcasts ... that we determine to be DMCA compliant." says Mike Apgar, CEO of SPEAKEASY.net.

Until broadband ISPs find a premium content model that works, DI and others like him must live off the largess, and patience, of companies like Nullsoft whose AOL/Time Warner masters must find this new field both irritating and irresistable all at the same time.

ALHPABET SOUP - DMCA, RIAA, ASCAP, BMI

Copyright issues loom large over Internet radio stations.. whether or one is "DMCA compliant" might end up deciding the fate of many of them. Unfortunately, broadcasters are never quite sure whether they are paying all the right license fees.

Ari is frustrated: "Unlike other labels, which charge based on our revenue (zero), one label required a large license fee based on listeners. We opted to instead remove all their content, however they informed us that they have disclaimer language which insists that no matter what we do, we will still be fully liable if we miss a single song".

He is also concerned for the future. His number one fear right now is that since he is the biggest, he is the most likely to get sued. "We pay what is being asked by organizations such as the ASCAP, BMI, etc, but I worry about that all the time", he said, "someone may make up spurious lawsuit.. there are hundreds of stations but most have few listeners, someone may choose my station to make an example of corporate power".

STREAMRIPPER vs LIVE365

With Napster emasculated, the RIAA may turn its attention to a high bandwidth streaming MP3 radio station like DI, and the software listeners use, since the music comes down to your PC in digital, un-encrypted form, complete with current album and song title conveniently repeated within the stream.

Jon Clegg recognized a year ago at the height of Napster that it would be simple for a radio stream to be turned back into the original MP3 files.. bit perfect. So Jon wrote "streamripper", a winamp plugin that would watch a radio station and neatly store and label every song that was played that it had not yet recorded. "I wanted to be able to record shoutcast streams, i wrote it because I could" says Jon.

Leaving streamripper on, one can copy the entire playlist of even the largest radio station. All one needs is disk space..

Ari understands streamripper use as it is convenient for his listeners to take DI on the road with them, for example onto MP3 players. But he says he does not approve of his mixes getting traded over file share services amongst strangers.

Jon is not concerned: "streamripper is open source", he says, "I merely look after it right now .. it cannot be stopped". His views on the RIAA are clear: "I can understand business men not wanting to lose money, however they should stop pretending they are protecting the artist".

In an unexpected move at the end of April, live365.com, perhaps forseeing streamripper blow its business plan to bits, sent him a cease and desist letter, and shut down the radio station "rogersclassical.com", which Jon runs for his father. Jon thinks this was done to pressure him to stop work on streamripper. Their excuse was that the station was not DMCA compliant.. a complaint Jon strongly denies: "The motive here is that live365 wishes to throttle streamripper before it becomes mainstream".
Live365 sent the same letter (they just changed the name at the top) to Streamripper32, the stand alone windows version of streamripper.

Ari speculates that live365.com may have been pressured to act in this heavy handed way by the RIAA, or fears of RIAA action, as rogersclassical is a large chunk of their listeners. Ari points out that live365 must build its listener base in order to support any revenue plans.

"I want to fight it, but I can't afford a lawyer" Jon says. But he is also confident his code will live on, Gnutella style. "all the code is open source, and copied all over the place".

AOL AND TIME WARNER

What is AOL doing running the bandwidth for these stations that may possibly be undermining the value of their own song catalog? "They know that piracy is not main-stream" says Ari, "they are prepared to finance this in order to turn the technology into some kind of pay service for their captive subscribers".

Nullsoft would not comment on our story, they are under NDAs in practically everything they do. Even Ari could not confirm any details of his stations relationship with Nullsoft.. which is why you can see no mention of them on his home page, but anyone tracing the stations broadcast IP address can identify the suppliers.

Live365 also, so far, has not commented.

Clearly this is a touchy subject everywhere.

"AOL wants to be involved in the online music technology, Nullsoft produces shoutcast, the leading internet radio station MP3 server. until AOL have decided what to adapt and sell to their subscribers, they are keeping quiet" says Ari.

THE FUTURE

One thing for sure, despite the efforts of Nullsoft and live365 to keep streamripper unknown (Nullsoft refuse to list it as a plugin on the winamp website, saying they are doubtful of its legality), it will only gain momentum as long as there are MP3 radio stations on the net. Jon thinks it is only a matter of time before it or something similar extends to Real audio and windows media formats, expanding its use to any internet radio now available.

Broadband users are delighted with streamripper if they find a station that matches their taste in music: "this thing is better than the wonder bra" posted one.

With the RIAA now cracking down on a wider range of copyright abuse than just Napster, it may be only a matter of time before they turn their attention to how to keep internet radio from being conveniently recorded by its listeners. It will be a tough nut to crack, as taping the radio (or TV) for personal use has always been allowed, and nothing states, even in the updated copyright act, that a perfect digital copy is any different. Unfortunately it would take considerable financial resources for a defendant to establish this in court.

The RIAA may attempt to criminalize MP3 broadcasting, perhaps starting an era of "digital music prohibition" on the Net with suspects being pursued using every means possible.

Unfortunately, as the architects of the 1920s prohibition might have said, not every problem can be solved by simply criminalizing the actions of otherwise law-abiding members of the public.