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From those court hearings and private meetings, three factors came up which play directly into web radio's surivival:

1. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a petition by webcasters to delay the imposition of the new fees. This basically means that the court agrees with the decision of the CRB to collect the hiked fees.


2. This one is where the broadcasters dodged the price hike bullet--Soundexchange "pledged" to delay enforcing the new fees until all of the negotiations had ended. This due to several offers that Soundexchange extended to webcasters. So now it is up to the webcasters to evaluate all the offers and possibily negotiate new rates.


3. The third applies only to small webcasters and that is Soundexchange will allow them to continue paying at 1998 levels through 2010.

Part of the CRB's new scheme states that a minimum of $500 will be collected on a per channel basis. So if a small internet radio station owed say $300 in royalty fees, they'd still be required to pay the $500 minimum. This scheme affects the large players like Yahoo and AOL who have hundreds of different channels that would translate to $500 each.

Representatives of the big players have offered a cap of $50,000 spread across all their channels. Soundexchange showed a willingness to accept the counteroffer provided the operators offer a more detailed reporting of their airplay and set up mechanisms to prevent "streamripping". This is a process where listeners can actually convert the music streams into permanent copies.

The delay in imposing the new fees also buys the web radio operators time to push a couple of bills pending in Congress which would seek to overturn the CRB's latest fee scheme and instead, they'll just pay 7.5% of their revenues. But if I'm not mistaken a congresswoman that's part of the panel involved in these bills has publicly stated that the webcasters should not expect that a resolution of the bill will happen within the year.

The ball is obviously now in the webcasters' court.

To recap, the court has already affirmed the CRB's new royalty fees as executory so what that means is that the webcasters should start paying those new fees soon. The only thing that's delaying it is Soundexchange's willingness to let negotiations on all offers play out.

Personally I don't think Soundexchange is going to sit around and let the negotiations drag out and I'm sure the webcasters' camp know that. They could just as easily say "Time's up" anytime soon because after all, the court has already agreed with the new fees. Anything that happens now outside of accepting Soundexchange's offers is only prolonging the webcasters' agony relative to the new rates. Surely there are offers on the table for the webcasters that were not made known to the public and definitely the lawyers representing them will be studying each one carefully.

As for the public, we still get to enjoy our favorite internet broadcasts for a little bit longer. For how long, that's up to the webcasters.