 Thanks everybody from Berkman for inviting me here. I hope I live up to the introduction. I'm here to talk about a project that's very, very new for us, and this is the first time I'm really speaking in public about it, and I don't have any documents. I have very little documentation to show you about it, but just as background, WFMU is now an independent non-commercial FM station. We used to be a college station. We belong to Uppsala College. The college went bankrupt in 1994, and we became independent at that point. We've been on the air since 1958, so next year is our 50th anniversary. We put up our first website in 1993, and immediately started putting some audio files with artist permissions. Actually, we got started right off the bat on the internet just establishing direct licenses with artists and bands. Initially, our website was just a few pages and about 10 or 20 songs that bands had given us permission to make available for download. We didn't start streaming until 1997, and right around the time we got active on the internet, that coincided with Uppsala College going bankrupt. It almost never happens that American universities and colleges actually close and go bankrupt, but it did happen to Uppsala College. They actually went chapter 7, Total Liquidation Bankruptcy, and that happened just as we were getting active on the internet, so we really saw the internet as a matter of survival for us because in the course of becoming independent, we had to absorb about $50,000 to $100,000 of new annual operating costs at the same time that we were also having battles with other public radio stations in the New York City area, and our FM broadcasting, our coverage area was getting whittled down, so over the course of the 70s, 80s, and early 90s, we saw our coverage area, our main FM coverage area, actually diminished to about half of what it had been, just from the FCC licensing other FM stations and granting power increases to some of the people who operated near us on the dial. The website we have now is pretty large. It's about 20,000 pages, which is mostly playlists of the DJs who type in at their own volition. We don't require them to keep playlists, but our listeners have actually put a lot of pressure on the DJs who are all volunteers to keep their playlists up, so the driving force behind that has actually been our listenership, not management, which is me. But the playlists have worked out very, very well for us because it's become a gigantic bank of metadata which has just grown organically about the songs we play, the albums we play, the artists we play, and in many cases you go to a search engine and search for some obscure artist and the first page that will pop up is a WFMU playlist. We developed the software that runs our whole website and playlists using MySQL, a PHP front-end, but we do pay a staff member to do that. He's fairly protective about it, unfortunately, so we haven't been able to share that with anybody. We've also experimented with a number of other web-based forums. We had a very active message board for about eight years, which had a good four years and then an abysmal four years, and then we pulled the plug on it. We learned a lot from that, and about two and a half years ago we launched a blog which we've put a lot more thought into and a lot more planning and paid a lot more attention to than our original message board, and we've learned a lot from the blog. At this point our Tecnerati rating is fairly high. I tried checking it this morning, but Tecnerati's changed the way they do that and I couldn't figure out... They were having problems where they've got some big problems to solve, I don't know. All they did is they switched the number of blogs that have linked to you in the last six months. They're now calling an authority. So now you're ranked by your authority, which is to say the number of blogs that have linked to you in the last six months. But yes, now it's under a level of obscurity, why they've chosen to do it. And as of this morning their database, as far as we were concerned, appeared to be empty. We went from having a Tecnerati rating of about 150 to just, I can't find any information about us at all. Another bit of our experience that pertains to the project I'm here mainly to talk about today, which is an open library project called the Free Music Archive, is that we've, for about five years now, maintained an internal MP3 library where we have about 220,000 song files. And that's only internal. We don't allow our DJs to access it from home. They can only access it from inside the radio station, and it's really meant for air play. It's just meant for our producers to be able to play things on the air. And just dealing with the search indexing for that has been a, and the backups and the HVAC and everything related to that has been a real learning experience also. We do make the MP3 library available for browsing in terms of the DJs can access the titling information, but for copyright reasons and for our own legal protection we don't allow people to access it from outside the building. In addition to that, we have a lot of podcasts going. We have quite a few podcasts that are not even on the air. I think we have at this point about 22 or 23 active podcasts. We have dozens and dozens of RSS feeds related to our blog, related to the playlist, related to all our streaming archives, streaming real audio and MP3 archives, so listeners have the option to subscribe to station-wide RSS feeds. Every playlist that the station does or they can subscribe show by show to a playlist RSS feed or MP3 streaming archive, et cetera, et cetera. We've also had file download sites. We have a fairly lame site called On the Download on our website, which we just haven't had enough money or time to put into, but we've also hosted other projects. We have a popular project on our blog called The 365 Days Project, which is a guy named Otis Fodder who is focusing mostly on orphaned works. We hosted Ubu Web, which is a website that was set up by one of our DJs, which is mostly artist videos and artist song files. Now, around the time that the web streaming royalty issue became big, in 2002, I participated as the representative of National Federation of Community Broadcasters, which I'm also on the board of. I participated in the negotiations with the RIAA and Sound Exchange to figure out what the non-commercial streaming rates would be for the first period, ending in 05. I actually sat at the table, a table much like this one, across from the lawyers for Sound Exchange. That was a real eye-opening experience that made me realize that there wasn't a whole lot of meeting ground between my perspective and I think the perspective of most non-commercial radio stations and what they wanted to do in terms of streaming and Sound Exchange. Sound Exchange maintained that there was zero promotional value whatsoever to streaming. They saw no promotional value whatsoever to a record being played on a streaming radio station and they've stuck to that ever since and they made it very clear that they would like to see per song, per listener fees applied to broadcast radio as well, which they are still hoping to achieve in the future. This was a complete... this is a very baffling approach to me because for decades in radio I've been receiving thousands upon thousands of promotional records sent to me by record labels so that we can play them on the air under the basic principle that if we play them on the air it will help them sell more records. And here I was sitting across from the lawyers for the record industry who were maintaining with a straight face that there was zero promotional value whatsoever to having their records played on the air, both on the web and on the radio. And they were... right now, they're kind of attacking the web aspect of it. So in 2002 when the webcast and community had its first day of silence we decided not to participate in the day of silence by silencing our stream which seemed to be exactly what the RIAA would want us to do. Instead we tried to play as much material that the RIAA could not touch as we could. And that has kind of been our approach ever since. It's been to try to license as much material as we can. And in early 2002 we mailed out several thousand waivers, one-page waivers to individual artists and independent record labels, asking them to waive our fees under sound exchange and also asking them to waive a lot of the other statutory limitations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act concerning pre-publication and the number of songs that you could play from a certain record and by a certain artist and so on. And we were amazed by the response. We immediately got about 400 signed waivers back within a week or two. And obviously the overwhelming number of people didn't respond at all because people tend not to respond. But we had about 400 yeses and two noes. And since then we've continued to get more and more of these waivers. So that's been our approach on the streaming, on the streaming side of things. But as this issue has just become a grave for concern to us and to all webcasters, we decided to really try to put more effort into setting up an online music library of cleared material, of material that would be completely free for non-commercial use. And that's what we're trying to do with this thing called the Free Music Archive. And thanks to the practice of Payola and the settlements that Elliot Spitzer got out and just record companies and radio companies, they set up something called the New York State Music Fund to support independent music. And we got one of the largest grants to do a variety of things, including putting on free concerts, improving our ability to document and record videotape and get good quality multi-track recordings of live performances with the idea of then licensing as much of that as possible to put into a free online library, including the Free Music Archive. So that's what we're trying to set up right now. And we want it to not only be a free library, but we also want it to have social aspects. We would like it to have a whole creative social community around the material. So it'll be a social community based around cleared material. And we want to also see that its growth continues by licensing as much of the material in there as possible under share-alike Creative Commons licenses so that the library can grow through derivative works created by its users, utilizing material in the library. So what we're trying to do is really, I guess, a combination of the curatorial approach that radio stations have traditionally played, as well as a user-generated approach, more common on the web. The material in the site would be available for streaming, as well as download. And we also want to have a number of options of playlists available to people so that we're not limiting the user base just to people who want to experience songs file by file by file. We also want to have certain options available for people to listen to it as a stream. So there might be random streams. There might be genre-based streams. Users might be able to put together their own streams so that any person with or without an account will be able to go there and listen to songs either file by file, either streaming them with an embedded Flash Player right on the page or downloading them, or choosing among a number of different stream options. The material that we're hoping to put in there is going to be comprised of a whole bunch of different things. Each one of these is a whole sub-discussion unto itself, but a lot of what we're going to try to put in there will be comprised of live sessions from radio stations, including our own radio station, but also live material that comes out of clubs and music festivals. We're also hoping to put a lot of public domain material in there. As I said, remixes of derivative works coming from the Free Music Archive in the first place. License tracks from commercial releases. We hope to be able to approach artists and record labels not under the expectation that they would license their whole back catalog, but perhaps if you go to a band and explain to them what this is about, then they might license one file. So if we get two or three hundred well-known bands to each license one file, that's the kind of thing that we're hoping. But there also are services out there that have already licensed entire record labels, like the label Kill Rock Stars. There's a company out there called Tables Turned that has already licensed huge amounts of catalog from certain independent record labels. So we'll be going after material like that. In certain instances we'll be including orphaned works, and that remains a big discussion about how far do we have to go to lower our risk using orphaned works. I understand that it's not legal to use orphaned works, but on the other hand, if there's truly nobody around representing that, then is there a real risk in using it? But how far should we go in determining that it's really, truly honestly orphaned, that there's really nobody out there protecting this work? We also plan to commission tracks from bands and artists and record labels so that there will also be banks of instrumental tracks, rhythm tracks, beat tracks, sounds, as well as radio programs that are clearable because of the type of material they have in podcasts. So that's the bank of material that we hope to put in there. And we hope that the users of the site will be a lot of the same people who've used FMU, which I affectionately described as artists and weirdos, tend to make up most of our listeners, as well as musicians, and your general radio listeners and people who just experienced music on the web. We're hoping to set up... We want the site also to be bigger than FMU proper. We want to partner... We want to find partners initially what we're looking at are other radio stations that are similarly minded to us around the country. And I think there's only a few, but there are a few. So we've been in discussions with radio stations like WWZ in New Orleans that has 7,000 hours of material of New Orleans artists that they're attempting to license and preserve. KEXP in Seattle, which has also done an incredible job licensing material. So they have a commercial song podcast, the song of the day. They have about a 95% success rate and getting bands to clear their material for that. So we want to be able to have this site... The default way that people would access it would be through one of the curatorial partners. Like we would be one. WWZ might be another. KEXP might be another. And that way, their material is going in and they are selecting their material so that it can be an online library that represents their radio station. But the curators, which is like the highest end user of the site, the curators wouldn't be limited to radio stations. We would want to leave it open to have anybody who could bring a great deal of licensed material to the site, whether it's an individual or a radio station or a record label or whoever. If somebody could bring a certain number of licensed tracks to the site that we felt were really interesting and creative and exciting, then they could be a curator, meaning they could have their whole interface, they could have their whole front end of the site. The public could use the site without having to register so that you can go on and stream or download files or entire streams without having an account at all. But we do want there to be a social aspect of it. So there will be members and certain, the social aspects will be limited to members so we think that they're the members. In order, you can use the site in terms of audio streaming and downloading et cetera, et cetera, for free, but if you want to be able to comment, if you want to be able to review, if you want to be able to upload derivative works made from material, then you would have to be a member. And we haven't really finalized exactly what we want, but we do want there to be some kind of hurdle for membership similar to the Metafilter model, perhaps, where you pay a one-time $5 fee and then you have a seven-day waiting period. And we also would like there to be some kind of probably slash code-based structure. And this is all based on our experience with our blog and with our message board, where we just saw how easily things can go downhill when you just have unlimited, unmoderated, anonymous commenting. It really killed our message board. We had been a very positive community and a really important part of the radio station. And based on our own inexperience, it just went completely downhill for the same reason that a lot of unmoderated, totally open comment communities end up going downhill. So we are looking at slash code as probably the best model for dealing with that kind of thing because we've also found that when you start censoring deleting comments, deleting accounts, it just creates more problems. It just incites people and they just try harder and harder and harder. So we like the idea of slash code so that members, new members come in and they have a certain rating that the established members of the community don't have to deal with, don't have to see if they don't want to, if they want to, they can see them. Which means we would also have to have other classes of users, such as editors and moderators, and some moderators would have to, it would be their job to periodically look at the newest comments from the newest members, listen to the newest uploaded remixes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I could stop here. I could keep going. I know of way exceeded my opening time. But I might as well take a break here and see if anybody wants to comment or discuss anything I've talked about so far. Oh, you're talking about our streaming waiver? Yes. No, the streaming waiver only covers U.S. We actually have a very, very small audience overseas as a percentage of our users. It's fairly small. Is that likely to become an issue or a problem when you put up the archive and suddenly there's this large set of downloadable material? Is anyone likely to challenge you for downloading outside of the U.S. law? Well, are you talking about the streaming side, the traditional radio streaming that we're doing or what we're planning on doing with the free music archive? I'm thinking specifically on the archive where you now have this large body of works that's likely to be highly appealing to or at least interesting to people who want to download material. Even if the default is sort of coming in through these playlists, the idea that there's this large quantity of downloadable and remixable material is likely to be really interesting. Is it going to be an issue that you have interest outside of the U.S. Well, we want it to be available to people outside the U.S., but the idea is that the material in there would be licensed by its creators. There would be non-commercial use with attribution and in some cases, non-commercial with attribution and derivative works as well. So I think that would cover people outside the U.S. What's not covered with the issue outside the U.S. is the traditional radio operation that we have going now. Will all of the music on the archive be licensed by SA? Or is there going to be room for different licenses or is that your minimum standard? No, there will be room for different licenses. A problem I might see is with paid membership is if you're using a non-commercial license is that some people are going to be a little bit reluctant to license it as the first real purpose. That is, you approach them and, yeah, I would like you to license your music initially for this archive, but it opens your music up to all these other interesting works, too. Is there any room for negotiability with the idea of the paid membership? Or is it more that you're just looking at it so that it's not like a free-for-all? Yeah, the purpose, that hasn't been, we haven't really determined that. I mean, the idea that you would have to pay in order to have a membership so that you could engage in the social aspects and the remix, it's really just a question of having some kind of hurdle. As I said, it's like the metafilter model where there's just some kind of hurdle so that anybody who wants to just get on there and promote something or get up there and just start a flame war can't just get on and do that. Create an account under a phony name and just get right on. There's some kind of hurdle and that's been really, really successful for metafilter. So that's the idea of that. But the other question you bring up, I think, is related to something that we also have not really determined yet, which is, what does it mean to be noncommercial? I mean, we want to operate this site noncommercially. We are a 501C3 charity and that's how we want to do it, but there's various definitions floating around out there about what it means to maintain a site noncommercially. And like archive.org has a fairly well-defined document on their site about what it means to them to be noncommercial. I don't necessarily agree with that. I feel that as a 501C3, as a charity, as an official IRS charity, what it means for us to be noncommercial is that any money that we end up making does not enrich an individual. So the station FMU now has a budget of a million dollars. When I started there, it had a budget of $40,000. We now have several million dollars worth of assets between our two radio stations and our building, but none of that enriches me. If I leave, the other people on the board don't buy me out. So to me, the definition of being noncommercial seems to be a legal IRS definition, which to me would mean that if there were ads on the site, as long as the ads weren't enriching an individual, as long as it's going back to the parent charity and covering the expenses of that parent charity, I think that's okay. But this is a discussion that, you know, it's going to be a big discussion. That's what the IRS thinks. The IRS basically says that a charity is not allowed to use the assets of the charity to enrich an individual. Now it's not that well-defined, especially when it comes to intellectual property. What are the assets of a charity? That's a big gray area with IRS rules. But basically, a charity can do any number of commercial things, including selling ads, including selling real estate, flipping buildings, et cetera, et cetera, as long as it's all going back to the parent charity. Now, if what you did to make money as a charity was unrelated to your mission, in our case, our mission is creating non-commercial programming for the internet, for radio and television. So if we do, if we make money in a way that's not directly related to the mission of the organization, then we have to pay not-for-profit tax called unrelated business income tax. So we want to operate the Free Music Archive non-commercially. We want to start it off with no ads. It would be nice to start it off with no fees for anybody. But we're going to try to state the goals on the site fairly clearly right from the start, that if it becomes impossible for us to maintain the costs to cover the expenses of the site, then we're going to leave the door open to possibly selling text ads down the road. But we are going to try to have a charitable business model. What we've always done on FMU in the past has always been a charitable business model. And in radio, it's always worked great. It's the whole basis that radio, that public radio is kind of premised on, which is that the more listeners you have, the more people will give you money when you ask them for it. And that's how we've always operated our website up to now, which is that we don't charge for anything. We don't require passwords or accounts for anything. We don't accept underwriting. We don't accept money from the government. So basically we just try to make, we try to get as many listeners as we can and hope that that one time a year when we ask for charitable donations, some people will come through. And we recognize that 90% of them will not come through. But if we have more and more listeners than the 10% who will give us a donation the one time a year, then it's worth it. And that's always worked for us up to this point. We don't know that that same idea will work on the Free Music Archive because it's no longer radio. We want to set up the Free Music Archive as a standalone website and we want to set it up as a standalone website that is not subservient to the radio station, that doesn't have its goal to be serving the interests of the radio station. That's another mistake that we've made several times, that we continue to make, I think, right now with our blog, which is that my radio staff thinks that the blog is there to serve it, to serve the radio station. The blog readers think that the blog is just there for them to read it, and that really is what it's there for. Same thing happened with our message board. One of the things that killed the message board was that the radio station, the DJs, the community of people who come in and make the radio station run started feeling like the message board was just a forum for message board people, for people who didn't necessarily like the radio station and they would develop this great resentment and a huge conflict developed between the radio staff and the denizens of the message board because we weren't letting the message board exist on its own terms, and to a certain extent, less so now, we're not letting the blog exist on its own terms. Right now I have resentment building up now because I keep giving more and more accounts to listeners and readers as opposed to my own DJs because my listeners and readers are the most prolific writers. So I want more content so I give them accounts. It's a group blog. There's about 40, 45 authors on it. And increasingly, more and more of the posts are by non-DJs. So the DJs are now becoming really resentful that like, who are all these people on the blog? Who are all these listeners and readers? So we want to just like establish it from the beginning with the Free Music Archive that it exists on its own terms. It's not there to serve the radio station. It is there to reflect the radio station musically what we've been about, but it's there to do it in a completely different form of media. And to bring it back to what we were originally talking about, that form of media, we don't know about the charitable fundraising aspects of it. I think it will work, but I have no proof that it will work. I mean, we have raised donations through our blog, but not much. Just last March we had our fundraiser. We raised $910,000 in total. And about $20,000 came from donations that were initiated from the blog. From a, you know, a donate button right on the blog. So a very, very small percentage. But I think that in the blogosphere and in the online music world, people are not accustomed to making a donation of $100, which is our average radio donation. There are accustomed to making a donation of $5 or $10. So I think that's what we have to be going for. But we haven't started that yet. So we're hoping that the site can maintain itself and cover its costs non-commercially with a charitable model. But I can't guarantee that. That's one of the really big question marks we have going in. Is the free music archive, is it going to be off-site initially? It's not going to be under WFMU's parent site. And if so, is WFMU acting as the key financer and the key, I guess, the first real curator, the curator number one? And as other curators come with either funding or with content, they'll have their own versions of the site with a coming back end. Is that what it's looking like? Yeah, that is what it's looking like. We've got a grant to start it up that funds it for two years and barely covers what we're going to need to get it going, especially on the software end. We do plan on starting it up initially, and then we hope that archive.org is going to start hosting the files. And the files will have a duplicate life that will exist within archive.org's site. But then we will also have our own front end that we'll host. And if we can't handle hosting the front end, then maybe they'll host our front end also. But that's one thing we're not sure about whether or not they would be willing to host our front end because we want it to have a distinct front end. We don't want it to be just subsumed by archive.org. Why would they care about that? The front end is not a big bandwidth thing. It's just the serving of the files. Yeah, I agree. I don't think that they would have a problem with it. And we've already been in touch with them. Well, they're doing it for our media, so I don't see why they wouldn't. Right. And they've been very positive about every suggestion that we've made about that. So I agree. I think that they probably will do that. Have you decided what software you'll be using yet? No, we haven't. We're hoping that we might be able to use the software that Dean is developing with the Participatory Culture Foundation. We're very, very hopeful that we might be able to utilize that. The problem that we have is we need to, because of the nature of our grant from the New York State Music Fund, we need to launch in like a year. Like June of 2008, we really need to launch with a certain number of minimal files like 30,000, 50,000 files. We already use MySQL to a great degree, and we already have a lot of stuff working on our site now with MySQL. So we could use MySQL and PHP, because we've already got that all going. But I would like to have whatever software powers this thing, be open source and just be freely available. And what we're using on our website now is using MySQL and PHP, but the guy who wrote it is very, very proprietary about it. I asked because within several projects that we've been working on a free culture, we've also been looking for good software for archiving Creative Commons and free music. And there doesn't seem to be an ideal solution out there that we have found. We did use CC Host, which was something that was developed by Creative Commons. It was a little bit frustrating. It seems like... Do you have somebody who is dedicated to working on coding this? Yeah. The guy who coded our website now. But the problem is that he's just one person, and we don't have much money to put towards the coding of this. So we're really hoping to find existing off-the-shelf tools. The way I'm thinking about that question now is I'm really hoping that the open library tool that PCF is working on might be doable for us. If not, then we're looking at using off-the-shelf open-source tools like Drupal and possibly Drupal in conjunction with Slashcode and that in conjunction with a lot of the MySQL tools that we've already been using. So that's kind of our plan B. Check with what Denver Public Access is doing. They're working on this. We'll talk off on that. Denver Public Access? I think ideally, if there were some kind of even collaborative free software project that people could work on and if there were specs or something, it would be really great if out of this project could come a solution for what we've all been looking for. Yeah. Because it's really been frustrating. We've also looked at Drupal and things like that. Dean, is there a schedule as to when your project... Okay. We'll talk about that later. Okay. And I also just wanted to comment on the funding model issue because I'd been talking to several Wikipedians at our Wikipedia meet-up a few months ago and they were saying, well, why don't we use text ads for Wikipedia? You know, we could make so much money off of that and we could have a lot more funding because it was during the annual fundraising drive. But I think with a community site like Wikipedia and with so many contributors, obviously this project is not yet on the scale of Wikipedia, but hopefully one day... It's not going to exist yet. Right. But they were saying how it's important, I think, that members of the community donate and I even like... I had several friends that don't even... They just like read Wikipedia articles and they said to me, oh yeah, I donate to Wikipedia. I love that site and it's great. So I think that there could be a possibility in a community-based funding model, especially when there are so many contributors ideally in the community. Yeah, I think so. I definitely think so. But I think that it's not going to be the same as it is in radio and radio make fairly large donations. I mean, our average donation is over $100. Yeah, I think it might be worth looking at what Wikipedia is doing and how their funding is working. And they even show... I don't know if they show exact... Maybe like the last 20 donations or something. Yeah, I really would like to see actual revenue figures. I really... Because I have not seen that for any site. I have no... They just closed quite a bit. Yeah. I'd really love to know exactly how much... the entire feed of everyone who's donated and how much they've donated. Of everyone? Yeah. Oh, yeah. That would be... Golden Discs out there. If I could jump in for a second. I'm actually working with Dean Janssen on the Open Media Library Project and we're really excited, hopefully, to work with you on this project. And we just had a working group here at Berkman about a week and a half ago brought together folks from Yale, MIT, Emerson, USC, folks from Public Broadcasting, Public Access Television that all recognized that, you know, absolutely, if we had an open source solution to share media as a basic starting point, it would be fantastic. So what has started as an idea that Dean really had that I've been working with him over the last, like, four months on trying to figure out what this thing might look like, it's really been incredible, like, the response from people. And really where we're at right now is obviously looking for money. We're working with a number of groups, other institutions who have shown their support, like WFMU, but we're definitely looking for other organizations openly to join with us and to work together on a project with a solution for this. So if there's anybody that's interested in digging in or has ideas or could help us out, it's a Berkman PCF joint project. We'd love your ideas and input on how we could get this project really off the ground and so that PCF could really just start working on it, like, today. Because it's an exciting project and everybody's really, you know, understands the need and understands why it's an important thing. Yeah, I mean, I'm recognizing because of the speed that we need to launch, that we may need to start off with something hobbled together from Drupal and slash code in MySQL and then move over to something else at a later point. So we're already kind of accepting that that may be the way it goes. There's another, there's a lot of people working on this also. Library of Congress has been working on trying to create an open library for much of their material and they've been working with a company called Vfinity, which is developing a tool based on MySQL and WNET in New York is really involved in that. It's a very, very similar thing. They've been working on that for six years now. But it's supposedly getting fairly close and they're about to start a pilot program and we're going to participate in that so we're going to see what that's like, too. Because that's, there's two aspects of that. One would be a full-fledged open library for the Library of Congress, like what we're talking about here. And the other aspect is what WNET has been most interested in developing which has been a tool that allows their television producers from all over the world to have a web-based asset management system that they can just all upload clips and text and audio files and video files and collaborate remotely from all over the world as they're trying to finish a documentary or a television program. So that looks pretty promising, too. There are some pretty powerful tools. I mean, I think Drupal might be able to go a good way to getting us off the ground in what we need to do. There have been some fairly impressive sites already that have gone up using Drupal, although nothing like what we're exactly what we're talking about, though. Sort of switching gears away from this new archiving project. What does the recent pricing decision mean for FMU as far as your streaming ability? Well, I mean, there's no way that we could possibly afford to go over the minimum number of aggregate tuning hours. There's just no way. So are you going to stop? We might eventually have to cap our streams. I mean, we're just, we're trying to just get more and more waivers all the time and just looking at the day when it's likely that we're going to have to cap our streams so that we don't exceed 159,000 aggregate tuning hours per month. Which is another reason why we're going so gung-ho towards this project, because this project will give us at least the ability to have an unlimited stream. If we can stream out of this bank of material, then we don't have to cap it. But we are looking at possibly having to cap our stream and we're just hoping that Congress might step in like they did in O2 before that becomes necessary. Is that sort of the last best hope at this point? Is Congress going to step in on this issue? Or are there any other legislation on the table? Are there any other possibilities on the table that would sort of get you around the current process structure? No, from what I've seen it really seems like Congress is the only hope that any attempt to negotiate or speak rationally to sound exchange has failed. And they're just they just want to throw out the baby that they can. They've been very open about the fact that they would like to see a world with maybe only five or six webcasting companies. That's what they want. Because that way they have the maximum amount of control over their material. I know it seems really irrational to the music community and to the broadcasting community, but that is what sound exchange wants. And once they've achieved that, they're really interested in setting up their model for broadcast radio where it's more like the rest of the world. The United States is actually unique in that radio stations and television stations can just pay a flat statutory license for unlimited broadcast of recorded material. In the rest of the country it is in the rest of the world, especially Europe, it is more like the sound exchange webcasting model where you pay per song, per listener. I don't think it's exactly like that elsewhere, but it's more like that. Although the fees are much more sane, too. But that is how it goes in Europe, at least. Have you thought about like redrafting your waivers to maybe make them available to other streaming radio stations? Like giving people an option to say I support streaming radio sort of and like having a database of like stuff that other web radio casters could dip out of? Yeah, we thought about that at first and we decided not to do that because we just felt like we couldn't handle it. We do have a database of people who've said yes to us. We have a couple of different variations on the waivers, but it's basically people saying yes to us. Also, I think it's one thing for a record label or an artist to say yes to one radio station and it's a whole other story if they're saying I will never get a royalty on my music from any radio station in the United States. I think that that makes it much much less likely that people would say yes. If you say non-commercial or college though, that would at least because so much of web radio is non-commercial or college. That's true. In O2 I started talking to a lot of people about this and I was really amazed at how at the reception that the idea of licensing material and getting waivers, sound exchange waivers, it gets a very cold reception for most broadcasters. Non-commercial and college stations like the idea but then generally say that they could never do it. Which I don't agree with. We have 500 waivers. We just did a mass mailing and 500 waivers came back. We didn't have to have 500 negotiating sessions. NPR stations have been incredibly negative about this notion. Probably because Corporation of Public Broadcasting, up until now, up until this round has always negotiated their own special deal with sound exchange. Sound exchange has also been incredibly successful at driving wedges through the divisions in the broadcasting community and the webcasting community and one of the ways they do that is by striking separate deals that are secret. I know I sound like a conspiracy theorist but they are. They're not public deals so for the period 2002-2005 or maybe it was 01-05 CPB and sound exchange had a special deal covering webcasting realities that applied only to CPB stations. Nobody ever found out what the nature of that agreement was. And that wasn't gettable through disclosures or non-profits after maybe not necessarily. No, I mean you have File 990 that basically covers payment to your staff that doesn't necessarily cover anything. You can't tell what's going on by looking at a 990. You're not going to find that out from 990. Unfortunately, not-for-profits are only required to file 990s which just obscure everything. There's now a movement for not-for-profits to have more clearly understandable financial statements available to the public but all they're required to do is make their 990 available. And if you looked at my 990 you wouldn't be able to see what was going on. I mean we also send out our profit and loss statement so that people can see where the money is actually going to anybody who requests it. All I know is at the time I was trying really hard to find out what the CPB sound exchange agreement was and I could never find out. It just wasn't available. And from what I understand it wasn't serious in XM or Pandora or any other group out there that they have special agreements with. Those are all secret agreements. And in the 2002 negotiations that I was involved in that attempted to determine the non-commercial webcasting royalties for that first period I saw sound exchange how they did it. The CPB was out of the picture because they had already struck their own deal so it was NFCB representing national religious broadcasters all the non-commercial Christian stations around the country and then two college radio groups. So there were four groups and one of the college radio groups IBS represented far more stations than anybody else. Immediately sound exchange just went off into a secret room with them and they just struck a deal with them. That left NFCB and another college radio group representing very few stations overall left there to quote-unquote negotiate. There's nothing left to negotiate. The deals had all been struck behind closed doors and now basically the statutory fees became based on those secret deals. These groups that have struck individual deals with sound exchange have they made any sort of public statements about why they think it's to their advantage to negotiate these separate deals I don't know if this would be possible but it sounds like we're trying some sort of non-profit radio solidarity to change the overall regulatory structure. Unfortunately there's no solidarity. I agree with you that if the non-commercial radio community could stick together then there would be maybe a chance but the problem is because sound exchange reserves the right to strike deals with anybody it wants to that can be much less expensive and the statutory deals they do that and that makes it impossible for the non-profit community to stick together. Do you think that the interests of say WFMU are in line with the interests of like a random NPR affiliate with the Christian broadcasting community with a college station do you think that your interests are wide enough that it would be possible to work together? Yeah I do but I think that as soon as an organization strikes their own affordable deal then they're going to go off and try to do that and forget unity and that's what's happened time and time again. Despite the complete antithetical goals that we have to national religious broadcasters I never would have expected that out of that group it was the Christian non-commercial broadcasters that I felt the most solidarity with. That's a weird coalition. I was just wondering I thought the standard was a willing buyer, willing seller what's the rationale behind them not being able to get at some of the contractual agreements? I understand they may have confidentiality in the agreements themselves but to me that's the best evidence as opposed to the economists that gave their testimony to the CRB. I'm not sure where it says that that sound exchange has the right to make private secret deals it may be in the digital millennium copyright act I'm not sure but they do they do have that right and they they use it again and again and I think CPB is still trying to strike a new deal now for this period a new period that we're in which is 06 through 2010. Did you have a question? Oh, with the FMU with the waivers that you sent out is this a process that you're continually doing? Yeah, not continually but with some frequency you're sending out new waivers, periodically and is there any I don't know is there any plan to and maybe this has already been done I don't know of it to at least make public the artists who are friendly to waivers or the labels that are so that maybe if it's too big of a project to actually say to mail out waivers or to add something to the waivers when you mail them out to just say if you want to mail out your own waivers contact these people first or these labels first they're usually a little bit friendlier than others Yeah, we've never considered doing that I make the waivers available to anybody who wants it I mean I've sent the waivers out to dozens and dozens of other groups that have asked me about our waivers we have a couple of different variations we have a podcasting waiver we have a streaming waiver we have one that covers both but we I don't think I would want to publicize the artists and the labels that have signed the waiver just because I think they might then get harassed you know or maybe even just an idea to create out of the NFCB just some sort of equal group of people who are like we're going to send our waivers out together and this could build into maybe something larger than that at least with the free music archive Yeah, I've never, we haven't done that you have to remember that the situation unfortunately that most college and community radio stations are dealing with is that they're way below the 159,000 aggregate tuning hours very very few community and college stations are in danger of having to start paying the statutory rate that kicks in above basically non-commercial streamers have a free pass that's worth about $15,000 so for 159,000 aggregate tuning hours non-commercial streamers only have to pay 500 bucks a year if they were commercial they'd have to pay 15 grand a year for that so they're getting 15 grand just like lopped off for free and for 500 dollars I say free but it's really 500 dollars a year and so few of them have audiences that exceed that that averages out to about 230 simultaneous listeners 24 hours a day so you'd have to figure out that you peak at 400 simultaneous listeners in the middle of the afternoon then the middle of the night you have 5 simultaneous listeners whatever it's an average all month long of 230 people listening at the same time and so few of them exceed that so few we're still slightly below that but we also have archives and then we also have another simultaneous stream we have another simultaneous stream actually that was completely covered by waivers because we have an ethnic show, we have a Jewish show that has its own 24 hour stream and they only play music by 5 record labels and all 5 record labels sign the waiver so we've just you know protected ourselves again and again that way the problem is that a lot of the cap the 159,000 tuning hour cap guarantees that they will never have audiences above that because they can't afford to go above that so the reason why a lot of them have the cap don't exceed that number already is because through their own short sightedness and just trying to save themselves money you know they sign up with services like live 365 or stream guys and they say no more than 200 simultaneous listeners you know so that the 201st person tries to get onto the stream and they're locked out which is an incredibly stupid way to stream because you have to pay by how many slots they make today so that's why you have to choose something yeah but it seems that the real power of the waiver is I mean for you it's at least initially so that you can ensure that you don't go over this I mean the ceiling, this glass ceiling that you have but beyond that you've started a dialogue with record labels and with artists and you're negotiating you're negotiating outside of what's legal and what's illegal you're saying this is to benefit you and you can carry that same argument too does it benefit you to make your content CC to make it by SA and I think that's where the power of having a bunch of different like WHRB WRBB like local stations here which we're already working with to do that having this group of people who you come into with the streaming waiver maybe not so important for smaller stations but it's definitely important for them to be building their own repositories and to be building kind of this the free music archive too having their own contributions to that and I think that's where the real power from it comes maybe not with the initial waiver but in the dialogue that you've started with that waiver yeah I agree I have no idea what the success of the waivers would be if you approached a record label and said we would like you to waive all your royalty fees for these ten radio stations as opposed for just one radio station I just don't know what kind of success you would have you know we did have we had two labels that told us no that they wanted the money you know I don't think they realized that they would probably never see the money I mean the way the digital millennium copyright act is written the RIAA has the legal power to collect royalties from labels and artists that don't even belong to the RIAA and then on the other side it also has the right to not give them money if it can't quote-unquote find them about six months ago some list was released by Sound Exchange of 9000 artists that it couldn't locate including YOLA Tango you know really hard to find yolatango.com but there were so many artists that were so easily found they were saying here are the artists we cannot find them to give them their money and there were just tons and tons of artists that were incredibly easy to find so they're allowed to collect money from people who don't belong to them and the only way around that is to get a waiver the only way around that is to have direct licensing between the streamer and the artist going back to the structure you mentioned that you're building any social networking aspects into the project what is sort of what is sort of the drive behind that like why do you see that being really important is it part of building the community for it and like why do you think building the community for the archive is important and like why not just have an archive by itself and like what's the point of having that well it just seems like when you put this kind of material out there and you do want to discuss it it just seems like a natural extension of it do you see it somewhere in like a few years like do you see is there some sort of agenda that you're hoping that not a agenda but is there some sort of goals or goals that you're hoping to attain with that like specifically or well the goal is that it becomes a bank of cleared material that then builds upon itself by people making derivative works out of it and hopefully people benefiting from the traffic that it generates so I think in order to achieve that goal it's important that people become members of the community that they interact with each other that they meet each other and it's just in general what what we want to be doing is build community based on this material it just seems like it would be fairly sterile without the community aspects to it although it would still be worthwhile I mean like one of the sites that we have been hosting is Ubu Web which is exactly that it's this bank of material although not much of it cleared unfortunately which is why we're now why we're no longer hosting it it's a really rich bank of material but there's no community there whatsoever it just seems like when there is the chance for there to be community it just really improves the chance that this is a vibrant body of material that can then build upon itself and evolve Do you plan to allow non derivative I don't know maybe I missed this in the archives so could there be files where people are not allowed to remix them? Yeah I expect that there will be people who will choose that kind of license Will you allow the sampling license to be familiar with that? I'm not familiar with that Essentially you cannot make a verbatim copy under the CC sampling license you can only use it in a derivative work as a sample so that may not be that useful actually I was just wondering because people in the community may it may be hard to discern between different things if one license says you can't remix another one says you can that even when you tell people things they just don't always get kind of like how people uploaded Metallica to our free music which is pretty ironic because they were one of the I might have done that It's like what happens with Flickr you can choose from a multitude of licenses even a lot of different CC licenses for your pictures but sometimes people just don't get it they don't know that they even have to select a license and so the default license is all rights reserved which means even like their family snapshots which clearly they probably don't care whether or not they're proprietary then become completely inaccessible so you have to educate people right from the start to say you can choose a license, here's what the licenses mean here's why you should choose to have a CC license so that you can give access to this material here's why it matters and then just commits them to do it but I agree it's like I don't even re-license all of my photos on Flickr just out of laziness I've seen that it has all rights reserved it's full copyright and they're like oh I didn't realize that nobody knows I think that it's an issue that we're going to have to deal with and that gets into the safe harbor provision of what do you do if people are just uploading copyrighted other people's copyrighted material we are actually going to make an effort to take that stuff down as opposed to what YouTube has done which is wink wink nod nod we'll take it down you know they're clearly not making much of an effort to take it down but I think maybe it would be important to have a certain remixable sections so that people can clearly know that those are the songs they can remix I mean my experience is that people just remix anyway I have a lot of friends that are DJs and that are just doing all sorts of different club edits or remixing and people just disregard copyright which I think in some sense is something for a lot of work that we're doing here but I guess in the case of your project you want things to be legit yeah legit yeah we're going straight I mean it's important that something like this exists I think I think it also becomes a strong argument against what sound exchange is trying to do because they've successfully maintained the myth that they control everything I speak to lay people what's going on with webcasting and they just think that the RIAA controls everything and that's just kind of an accepted myth out there and there is there obviously this is not what we're trying to create here is not obviously not the first pod safe library there's dozens of pod safe libraries out there I guess the only difference is that we're trying to apply a curatorial vision to this one so that it doesn't fill up with crap you know that's basically the difference that the different approach that we're trying to do so where do you try to line out what crap is and who's trying to line the editors so each editorialized like kind of view of the page is going to look a little bit different and maybe there's one database with everything but you have different editorial layers yeah okay curators would have the curators would have their own editors so each curatorial group would have its own group of editors and yeah you would be able to look at everything but that wouldn't be the default way of viewing it so somewhere there's going to be a back room of everything yeah you could if you wanted to look at everything that every single curator has put in there and every single editor has put in there yeah you can look at everything but that's not going to be the default way of looking at it because that I think will get just overwhelming and I think that's part of the problem with archive with archive.org is that it just becomes everything and it's completely overwhelming and like as a music fan if I start diving into archive.org I start feeling like well this would be great if I loved jam bands but you know and that's also the problem that we had with our own internal mp3 library we wanted our djs to use our mp3 library and we have all different types of musical you know all different types of musical tastes at fmu we didn't want people feeling like the internal mp3 library was all material from the 1920s so if we had 10,000 files that we were ready to put in there of Edison cylinders in 78s we didn't want to put them put them in there right away because then 90% of the material would have been Edison cylinders and then our user base 150 people internally at the station would have felt like oh the station's mp3 library you know is all ragtime you know great if I don't want we had to kind of like put material in it carefully so that one genre didn't become overwhelming to it and then we're going to try to do the same thing with the free music archive if we have an overwhelming amount of licensed hip hop tracks we're not going to want to put them in right away so that for a month it would be 90% hip hop we'd rather have it sort of like evenly based across a whole bunch of different genres and then gradually build all of those well you might think about and this is one of the things that we're doing at Antenna Alliance is bringing in outside curators so it passes off the editorial layer to someone else so on the FME front page if you can track down Yolotango you might grab one of them and have them put up 15 freely licensed tracks from people that they appreciate and you also get people doing your work for you as well you get them seeking out new bands bands that they like they know that if they get their music on the front page it's going to help them out a lot and it does a lot of your work for you and also if you reach out to say mp3 bloggers a lot of what they're doing there was already curating music and there are blogs out there with really quite large followings so I think if you were able to incorporate those into the curatorial aspect of the site I don't know how much control are you planning on exerting over the curators is it just internally? well we're planning to exert control over a curator but once they're curators then they would find their own editors and you can use the user base to turn them into editors there's no saying who can be an editor but it's the curators it'll be the curatorial groups that will decide who's going to be an editor for their portal and does it all have to be on your site? so what if someone already has a blog and they're already writing that music and they want to have special free music that's fine that happens already I mean that happens with our blog already that every single mp3 that we put up on our blog automatically appears on like hype machine hype machine we're one of the music blogs that they pay attention to but that happens already the problem with mp3 bloggers it's an irony because mp3 bloggers and podcasters they get serviced they get serviced by record labels who send them promotional copies so they can illegally post material because it has promotional value unless it's an implied license yeah but there's so many podcasters there's so many podcasters and mp3 blogs out there who get the same cds in the mail that we're getting and they know why they're getting it they're getting it to post the material online for free against copyright law because it has some kind of promotional value but I think for most mp3 bloggers they're just not accustomed to having to deal with the licensing layer and I think that dealing with the whole licensing layer this is probably going to be the biggest hurdle that we have to go through and we're going to have that kind of a whole social layer of helping people deal with the licensing and another thing going along with licensing also like if a band comes and plays in our studio they may not even have their own copyright on that material so we have to help them get copyright because they're not going to want to license their they shouldn't license their material under a creative commons license if they don't even hold the copyright on the material yet are you if they already signed away their copyright to a label you'd have you try to but they may not a lot of bands don't even have labels are you talking about original material? okay so if it's a cover song then maybe they don't hold the copyright it's an original song that they haven't trademarked or copyrighted copyrighted is automatically granted so that wouldn't be a problem as soon as they put the cc license on it they still can re-license it anyway that they like you don't even have to register a copyright unless you're looking to litigate it so that's not an issue but for their own protection wouldn't it be in their interest to try to get a formal copyright copyright is automatically granted as of 1976 there's no such thing as copyrighted yeah basically for books it's the same way like you don't have to send everything to the Library of Commerce that could be copyrighted because if it could be then it probably is as of 1976 you don't even need to put notice and registration so you don't even need to get to the copyright symbol in a year it's just there so if you create something it's automatically copyrighted because you write something on a napkin and it's automatically copyrighted it's interesting I didn't know that is there some sort of holy grail of collection that you would like to get licensed that will suddenly make this sort of viable to an extent that it isn't already or is this really the agglomeration of a lot of small collections I mean is there some sort of giant stone to move that suddenly if this label or this collection or this group licenses that material to you the archive is sort of viable in a way that another one wouldn't be? There's not one single collection that we're looking at it really is the combination of all the different things that we're thinking about trying to license one thing I didn't mention at all was that the whole metadata end of this we're planning on adopting PB Core which is WGBH's XML based metadata convention which has like 50 different fields it's kind of overwhelming all the different data that they're trying to collect but it's something that public broadcasting is really embraced as a way of cataloging and tagging all their material as opposed to Mark I don't remember what Mark stood for but it was like the old library standard so we are planning on keeping probably a MySQL database of based in the PB Core so you can see what PB Core is all about by going to PBcore.org and and then the PB Core data would be exportable to the more consumer based fields that we'd be dealing with like with MP3s with ID3 tags so you could take like the artist song title, album title year genre and they would be exportable from PB Core to the ID3 tags of the files so we're planning on trying to rely on the user base to help us tag material and try to have like almost a tagging community but that we've had a lot of internal debates about how much metadata and labeling information are we going to require people when they upload and this is not a debate that we've resolved yet I mean if you look at a situation like YouTube part of YouTube's success has been that it's so incredibly easy to upload anything but then that also becomes its biggest problem is that searching for things on YouTube you sometimes have nothing to search for so I want there to be some data but on the other hand if somebody has a remarkable remix that they've done would you rather not have it or would you rather have it with just a file name I'm not quite sure but a lot of the people who a lot of the team at FMU are feeling like there's got to be some kind of minimal standard there's got to be some minimal amount of information that's required before you can upload material and we also want to rely on people to help us tag stuff more but then you get into the question of vandalism like Wikipedia deals with all the time where you have to have the ability to roll back the tags to an earlier date in case an entire collection gets vandalized how about questions of providence you know an obscure 1960's Brazilian band and I start uploading MP3's of it and claiming them as my work and sort of saying I'm authorizing release of this is that a sort of concern that you guys are looking at or is there any sort of concern about checking the providence of people who are uploading to this instead of checking yeah I am concerned about that I'd be a lot more concerned if the safe harbor provision of the digital millennium copyright act was repealed because that's where we would get protection for that kind of situation but I also think that it's a completely I mean YouTube makes no effort at that you know and I think that even with a little bit of effort you can prevent most of that they would take things down my friend actually was the person that dealt with a lot of the GMCA claims for a while they would take things down and the problem was that the DMC would just repost them and the way that the DMC works is that they actually have to point to the specific file for them to take it down so there's no like they're not required to filter such that if somebody reposted that daily show clip they'd have to take it down right away so the copyright holder would have to come back and say alright somebody else posted that it's kind of a cat and mouse game yeah but that's also Viacom's argument is that they shouldn't have to spend all their time you know policing YouTube that YouTube should have to make some effort on their own and I think that's accurate that you know what you're saying is right that they would take things down and put it back up but for such a long period of time they weren't doing that and YouTube knew perfectly well they were always accepting DMCA requests and taking things down oh yeah if Viacom requested that they took it down but for the longest period of time it was quite clear that you could go daily show on any Colbert rapport and you'd go there and there'd be whatever 500,000 views on it right because they hadn't send Viacom had to send the request yeah but my point is that Viacom shouldn't have to send the request if it's so obviously somebody else's material but the problem is once they start filtering then that gets murky within the DMCA you have to go into liability also once they start actively filtering they actually take on certain liabilities under DMCA there's a huge incentive to try to remain as close to a common carrier as possible and to basically be out there and essentially claim no authorship or no filtering of your content this becomes a huge issue for anyone who's hosting content I used to be in the homepage hosting business and one of the things that we found very difficult was actively filtering for things like child pornography without getting ourselves into trouble for say software piracy because essentially under DMCA once you are actively filtering the question then becomes what's your responsibility for actually filtering for it so what most lawyers end up telling you to do is to take a fully responsive stance which is to say that as soon as the request comes in to remove you can remove other than that you can make the argument that if in your ordinary business procedures you are finding content that is obviously violating then you're capable of removing it but you do not want to set yourself an active filtering stance because at that point then you have the possible liability of being responsible for all the content that's been posted so it's this very very sensitive way of sort of staying within the safe harbor provisions obviously you're going to want to find a very good lawyer who's litigating some of the stuff under DMCA before you sort of go too far with this that's a good point I doubt that the safe harbor rule is going to remain the same beyond the Google Biocom lawsuit so we're probably looking at it it is at least a couple years out as they work their way through that we're going to try to establish certain at least internal standards I know that a lot of people have been working on fair use standards and we're going to want to have something like that we also want to set up our own procedures for orphaned works for how far we try to go ourselves and how far we expect other people to try to go to locate the owner of an orphaned work if you have a 45 RPM single from 1940 how far do you go trying to write letters to any address that you can find and using search engines that might get into similar problems that you're talking about though is there any hope for you guys and one of the things that is now becoming a topic of discussion is that a lot of British labels are looking at material that will suddenly be public domain under British law because that term of copyright is shorter and are then reissuing collections of public domain materials under UK law despite the fact that this stuff is still protected under US law is that something that you guys have considered instead of looking at this and saying that this is now available under an open license under UK law maybe it's something that we can bring into an archive at that point we've put some stuff on our blog that we felt was available under UK law like material that was put out by the government but no we haven't looked into that so much in fact we got a takedown notice one time for material that we put on our blog and we initially complied we put it back up because it looked like it looked like they were wrong and that we did have the right to put it up which was World War II propaganda material broadcast by the Nazis the anti-Semitic big band swing music Charlie and his orchestra we put up several collections of Charlie and his orchestra which was a British anti-Semitic band leader working for the Nazis and it was very very unclear who owned the material but it fell into British hands in any case the record label that had put it out in Britain and we initially took it down but then we researched it and it turned out that they actually didn't own it they had as much right to put it out on CD and sell it as we had right to put it on our blog but yeah in terms of international in terms of there's a prediction with the gap between the UK copyright term and the US copyright term that there's sort of an increasing window of material that's going to become available and of course the interesting thing for everybody and this is waiting for the Beatles to sort of enter this window which we're still about 10 years away from but there is suddenly Skiffle becomes available under public domain and that's actually kind of interesting to go for this what's happening is a lot of these reissue labels are releasing this stuff in the UK and then it's getting re-imported into the US and so that actually opens the sort of fascinating possible legal loophole for you guys where if what you're doing is making the argument well actually what we did is we digitized the British recording which was released under public domain and now we have access to this it's an interesting question I don't know whether that will that is interesting in the UK also I know there was talk of extending the copyright term it was only one of them it wasn't it was either the recording or the composition that was out of step with the other with my understanding I don't know the specifics of which license but I believe what happened was there was a government request for review and a question of whether there would be a recommendation that British copyright law come into full compliance with US copyright law the surprise to everyone was that the recommendation did not exist that the two copyright terms align and so that's what's opening up this possibility of material that's legal under UK law it was still only one of the recording or the composition though I don't know there's another possible loophole also which is the 1972 FONO right in the US and material that was issued prior to 1972 in the US not reissued since 72 is not protected as a FONO right under federal law but it's only protected under state law and the rules in every 50 every one of the 50 states are different so we can probably we're expecting it to be able to find a great deal of material through that as well but you will have to check state by state we do have to wrap up but you guys are welcome to stay afterwards and talk to Ken I just wanted to thank Ken for coming by thank you