Proposal talk:Wikipedia music radio
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"Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users?".
 The level of discussion of this proposal is: Unknown |
Impact?
Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 01:14, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
Copyright
In running a Wikimedia internet radio station, many of the physical logistical issues would be solvable, although rather costly on a large scale. However, one nearly insurmountable obstacle is that of copyright. There are almost no public-domain music recordings, especially of any artists active in the past few decades. Most public-domain material is also not in digital format, but stored on vintage media that may be difficult to read digitally (i.e. 8-track tapes, records, wax cylinders, etc.). Thus almost all music that is available in digital format, or that could easily be transferred to digital format, is copyrighted; most of these copyrights are held by large international corporations with long histories of tight-fisted usage control.
The major reason this presents an issue is that to play any recording that is not in the public domain over a digital stream, the broadcaster must pay royalties to the owner of the recording. In the case of any sizeable listening audience, this would get very costly very quickly. Barring significant external funding sources, this project would be impossible to support beyond a very small size with Wikimedia's current free-access open content model, at least under current international and US copyright law. 128.120.218.130 23:15, 21 September 2009 (UTC)
Although this sounds great to me, it has lawsuits and extreme cost written all over it. It just isn't practical.--ToddBGoldberg 04:24, 22 October 2009 (UTC)