the DMCA is retarted

Do any of you know what this is? You should. well, it's actually too late. I know I was complaining about this a few years ago. Little good that did since the act passed. This is an act that was rammed through congress by the record industry to attempt to stop pirating of music. As usual, the stupid fucks have shot themselves in the foot.

One of the negative impacts of the act is that webcasts can only play a small number of tracks by a given artist in a 24 hour period. This is directly affecting my listening of the XPN 885 greatest albums since there are a number of times where artists on the list have multiple entries. This will further affect things when we get to the top 25 (Starting at noon today). Once they hit 25, they will be playing the albums in their entirety, so I will have the stream interrupted over and over again. This isn't happening on the radio (where I should add I could get a better quality recording than this 96k stream), just the net.

Now I'd like to argue that while listening to this webcast I've added 10 albums to my amazon wish list. Stuff I would never have heard before. Stuff I wanted to have purely becasue I had heard it here. I suspect I'm not alone in this. This is why radio (and web radio) are such amazing tools for the record industry. I ask you, by forcing XPN not to play some music, how does that help them sell records? I can't wait until these idiots go bankrupt.

For further reading, here is the post on the XPN site about it:

ONLINE LISTENERS - PLEASE NOTE: During
the playback there may be times when we must switch
from the countdown
to an alternate music stream
in order to comply with the Digital
Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). This act restricts the
number of songs we’re
permitted to webcast from any one artist over a specific
amount of time. When this happens you can stay on
top of the current countdown by visiting the 885
countdown page here. You can
find the full text of the Act at the U.S.
Copyright Office Web Site. Here
is a direct link to the PDF file of the DMCA Summary Document.