NY Public Radio Station WNYC Decides That Time Shifting = Piracy

from the for-shame dept

Mon, Apr 9th 2012 7:11am — Mike Masnick

I grew up in NY, and used to listen to WNYC quite a bit as a kid. It's the local public radio station. I'm pretty sure my parents still listen to it all the time. Also, I'm a huge fan of WNYC's On The Media program, which I link to frequently (and, full disclosure, who have had me on as a guest a couple of times). So it's somewhat disappointing to find out that someone at the organization appears to think that timeshifting is piracy. It is not, and the organization is wrong.

Trey Harris is a big fan of WNYC, and a regular pledge drive supporter. Of course, to make his listening easier, he uses a program called Flip4Mac, which not only lets him listen to the streams, but lets him do some basic time shifting of the streams: pause, rewind, fast-forward, etc. This makes the WNYC feed more valuable and useful for him, and he's shown it by supporting them even more, having recently increased his yearly contribution.

Unfortunately, WNYC thinks he's a crook. A few days ago, the app stopped working with the WNYC feed. Trey contacted them to let them know that there must be a bug that needed fixing... and he was told instead that the app had been blocked because of piracy! As he notes, the folks making the decisions at WNYC apparently are wholly unfamiliar with the ruling in the Betamax case that says that time-shifting is legal. It's why VCRs and DVRs are legal. There's no reason why streaming audio shouldn't be legal as well.

After complaining about this publicly, WNYC (actually, the "donor's office") contacted him to clarify. They said that they weren't accusing him of piracy, but that their streaming provider said that app was used for piracy, and that's why it was blocked. Still, they argued that time shifting is "piracy"... but only if done online.

She agreed that if I used a tape recorder, or a digital recorder, to store the over-the-air broadcast, I could listen to it later, pause, rewind, etc. But she said when it went over the Internet it was different. I brought up the TiVo example, and she responded that video-on-demand programs often disallow fast-forwarding. "It's a whole new world," she said.

It's not "a whole new world," in the way she thinks. There is no requirement that a DVR disable things like fast-forwarding. There is certainly no reason for them to disable this use. It's not "piracy." They're broadcasting this free over the air, and this is just someone recording the legitimate stream. All of that is perfectly legal. The only reason to break the ability to do this is to piss off legitimate listeners.

Of course, even if WNYC officials are totally wrong about this, it's really not that surprising. In a world of copyright maximalism, where we're continually taught about "ownership" of ideas and content, even where it doesn't make sense, some people almost have an instinctual reaction to think that any use like this must be "illegal" somehow. It is not, and it's a shame that WNYC seems to be sticking to this bogus explanation. Of course, I also wonder why WNYC thinks of services like dar.fm, which appears to offer up a bunch of WNYC shows for time shifting.

The whole thing remains pretty silly, of course. Time shifting is legal. An operation like WNYC shouldn't just be fine with it, it should encourage it because it makes their shows more valuable, meaning more people will listen -- and more people will be interested in donating and supporting what they do. It's a shame that they clearly haven't thought this through and simply jumped to the false conclusion that this was some sort of evil piracy.

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Filed Under: on the media, public radio, timeshifting
Companies: wnyc

57 Comments

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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:28am

OMG, you're stealing the free to listen radio program! How can you live with yourself.
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John Doe, 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:29am

Real timeshifting here...
Real timeshifting here is people like this trying to go back in time when they could control their listeners.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:29am

The whole thing remains pretty silly, of course. Time shifting is legal. An operation like WNYC shouldn't just be fine with it, it should encourage it because it makes their shows more valuable, meaning more people will listen -- and more people will be interested in donating and supporting what they do. It's a shame that they clearly haven't thought this through and simply jumped to the false conclusion that this was some sort of evil piracy.

Wah! I don't like what someone else is doing with their property! Rabble-rabble. Whine-whine.
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E. Zachary Knight (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:32am

I am not really surprised to see that someone in radio considers time-shifting piracy. Since the cassette tape, radio stations at the behest of music labels have been at war against people who record music from broadcast streams. While most of those efforts have simply made recording more frustrating, it hasn't stopped it.

What really surprises me is that mass market recording devices have been staved off for so long. I would assume that this is more of a result of the market's focus on television as the primary source of entertainment.
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E. Zachary Knight (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:33am

Re:
Wah! I don't like what someone else is doing with their property! Rabble-rabble. Whine-whine.

Yeah, I think you pretty much nailed WNYC's point of view there. For some reason they don't like that people can use consumer electronics to record broadcast radio. It doesn't make a lot of sense at all.
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Jason, 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:34am

Response to: Anonymous Coward on Apr 9th, 2012 @ 7:29am
The listeners who want to time shift can do a hell of a lot more than whine. Public radio continuously is asking for money from its listeners.

I hope the listeners punish them for being copyright maximalist bastards.
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G Thompson (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:34am

Hang on...

OnTheMedia even offer up an embed source for their interviews etc and it even has an 'OMG the pirates have hacked it' download option.

Confuzzled now
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G Thompson (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:36am

Re:
! Rabble-rabble. Whine-whine.

Yes we know you are, its self evident, you really don't have to emphasise the fact.

Needy much?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:37am

Re:
Wah! I don't like what someone else is doing with their property! Rabble-rabble. Whine-whine.

Wait... are you mocking the constumer who donates to support the show, recieves the stream, and expects to be able to use his computer and programs without coperate interfierance artificially limiting the cunsumer's property to protect a public stream?

or...

are you mocking the company that owns this combination of sound, takes the money of supporters, ignores established laws, and claim that thier listeners are one record button away from being pirates complaining about how the customer wants to use his physical propterty(the computer)?
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Zakida Paul (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:47am

Wouldn't that make podcasts and Sky Plus (or whatever the US equivalent is) piracy? This idiocy never ceases to amaze me.
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silverscarcat (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:05am

What's not piracy these days?
Seriously...

Recording stuff off of TV or radio with blank DVR/TiVo/DVD/VHS or iPod/CDs/Cassette..

Buying bootlegs...

Downloading...

If all that is piracy and illegal, then there's no options left to enjoy stuff...

Download everything.
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jupiterkansas (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:06am

What are they thinking?

I get the On the Media podcast in iTunes where I can listen, pause, fast forward, and copy it to my heart's content.

The only radio I don't listen to is the radio I CAN'T download to my computer.

Idiots! It's not about a stupid broadcast signal anymore.
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The Devil's Coachman (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:09am

Another reason not to donate to public radio
They're publicly funded, and "free", and now they claim that piracy is a threat to them? Then let them go out of existence by refusing to contribute a dime to them and their stupidity. They deserve to.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:19am

this is the sort of thing that happens when everyone is so afraid of being accused of either 'piracy' or 'facilitating piracy'. the whole business has gotten so out of hand and because there are no provisions to be compensated for false accusation, no one really dares take a risk. of course, checking out (using their own legal dept, maybe?) whether what they think is 'piracy' actually is 'piracy' would be a huge help!
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MrWilson, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:23am

Piracy is just another moral panic like any other. It always starts with ridiculous claims by outraged people who speak out for their own benefit and then escalates into even more absurd proportions when people jump on the bandwagon and get caught up in the bullshit.

First it was that home-taping was killing movies (which strangely increased in revenue with home-rentals and purchases). Now piracy is the cause of anything bad in the entertainment industry, including the reason why media companies screw their customers over, even though that behavior hasn't changed since before online copyright infringement. And now any use is "piracy," whether its "publicly" broadcasting a movie to yourself in private or time- or format-shifting, making personal backups, etc.

It's the same way that opposing corporate greed or caring about other citizens is "socialism" and doing anything suspicious is "terrorist" behavior, like being Muslim in public or questioning the TSA's effectiveness. Oh, and the temporary tattoos are laced with acid, there's poison in the Halloween candy put there by modern witches and satanists, and kids are getting high by listening to drug-effect-inducing sounds.
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MrWilson, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:24am

Re:
Oh, and there's communists in the State Department!
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hothmonster, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:35am

"but that their streaming provider said that app was used for piracy"

Isn't this really the crux of the issue? Someone has a competitor and doesn't want to compete with this app, so they convince the license holder that this app is being used nefariously, block it and get the traffic back without having to actually improve their product.

Sounds like the source of 95% of piracy arguments.
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Glen, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:36am

Sounds like its time..
to stop contributing and encourage others to stop also until they become a little more "open minded".
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Pixelation, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:37am

Handful of sand
The harder they make it to enjoy their product the sooner they will go out of business. I say let them charge people to listen. Charge a lot.
Squeeze that handful of sand.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:50am

Why do you choose to ignore what they say and read into it something completely different? They don't say time shifting is illegal, they say that tool CAN be used for piracy. It probably IS being used for piracy by others. At no point do they claim that what he is doing is illegal or immoral. The say they are blocking that tool because it can be used for piracy. Stop reading more into it than the radio station reps say.

Just for future reference, anytime I see the following phrases I complete skip over them:

copyright maximalist
legacy content industry
hollywood accounting
entitlement

You have overused those phrases to the point that they are meaningless (see semantic satiation). It's like a parrot who has a limited vocabulary. BAWK copyright maximalist, BAWK BAWK copyright mazimlalist, polly want a cracker BAWK. It's fitting that the first thing that came to mind was a parrot considering how many piracy advocates and actual pirates frequent this site.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:00am

Re:
How do you pirate a free broadcast exactly?
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TimK (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:02am

I am so confused.

So.....its a freely available public radio broadcast. They are 'listener supported' so they don't have commercials that are being skipped. They don't sell their 'podcasts' online so they aren't losing that revenue...in fact, they have them available FREE on their own website.

So, what exactly is being pirated? And more importantly, why do they care?

I mean, of all the cases of "piracy" that have ever been discussed here, this one I get the least. I mean, I just don't get it.

It seems like the only reason is "because we don't want you to".
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gorehound (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:04am

What a bunch of losers !!!
I would maybe sue them for a dollar just so People hear about what they are doing and then I would just find another Radio Station to listen to.
This Station is so wrong.
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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:14am

Re:
Everyone talked about the station, but the issue seems to fall on their streaming provider.
Is the iTunes stream free or is it pay?

Our Government blindly listens to what the **AA's tell them about piracy, somehow trusting they aren't lying to protect themselves... why do we expect a radio station to know better?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:17am

Re:
How exactly could it be used for piracy? They clearly stated that recording via cassette is fine, so I don't see how you could do anything with this application that would be any different.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:17am

Radio; One hour POS commercials interrupted by 40 minutes of POS programming that in all reality was 10 ACTUAL minutes of information.

Does that about sum it up?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:24am

Re:
Your presistant little piss ant ain't ya
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:32am

Re: Re:
I listen to WYNC's Radiolab which is free on itunes and like 20 other places, I imagine all their programs are the same.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:33am

Re: Re: Re:
One of those 20 other places is WYNC's own website...
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velox (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:38am

Re:
BAWK piracy!, BAWK infringement!, BAWK BAWK theft!!
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Almost Anonymous (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:39am

Re:
"""Why do you choose to ignore what they say and read into it something completely different? They don't say time shifting is illegal, they say that tool CAN be used for piracy. It probably IS being used for piracy by others. At no point do they claim that what he is doing is illegal or immoral. The say they are blocking that tool because it can be used for piracy. Stop reading more into it than the radio station reps say."""

Well shit dude, according to your deranged logic, they need to shut down the whole station, because any "tool" that can be used to receive it can be used to commit worse crimes than piracy!

Listen to the radio station in your car? Your car can be used to KILL PEOPLE!

Listen to the radio station at home on your radio? You can bash someone over the head with it and KILL THEM!

Tools are evil! Ban all tools!

#piracyiseverywhere
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Almost Anonymous (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:40am

Re:
They have "drive times" which are essentially long pleading commercials. I suppose you could skip over those?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:42am

Re: Re:
You can't. Things can't have negative values of money unless theres been a serious case of Derp, so theres no loss from recording free audio. or free video.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:46am

If the software has piracy use(everything does) and blocking it created a news story. then a whole new crop of potential pirates are linking over to check out the software.
We must DRM the airwaves its the only way to be sure. o wait that's nuke the sight from orbit... it's best to do both.
DRM your content and nuke your customers.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:56am

No worries I trolled them for America!

"Techdirt Quote."

("She agreed that if I used a tape recorder, or a digital recorder, to store the over-the-air broadcast, I could listen to it later, pause, rewind, etc. But she said when it went over the Internet it was different. I brought up the TiVo example, and she responded that video-on-demand programs often disallow fast-forwarding. "It's a whole new world," she said")

"My email to them."
LOL After that quote on techdirt the only conclusion I can come to is that she is fucking retarded. I mean the dumb bitch contradicted herself in that moronic quote rofl!

Pausing a movie on dvd = ok pausing the same movie on a stream not okay. Do you realize how fucking stupid that sounds? Where is the goddamn logic?!?!
I mean sure this might not have any impact on me since I'm 900 miles away but Jesus Christ this is just so stupid I could not help myself I had to send this.

Ask yourself this..
Streaming a movie. = Piracy
Sharing a dvd. = Okay.
Loaning a tool or anything else to someone = ok "Even though it's directly costing someone money since the person it was loaned too did not have to go out and buy another."
Having a website that people are bound to post infringing materials on. = Not okay. "On top they are held responsible to some extent."
Buying a gun and killing someone. "Smith & Wesson and the many others should be held responsible based on the logic listed above."

A note to the first person to read this.
For the love of god please slap that bitch in her propaganda spewing sewer hole she calls a mouth.
Maybe we get lucky and it knocks some sense into her.

Signed
Da Fuck?!?!
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Public Radio Employee, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:58am

They're not saying timeshifting is piracy.
From the beginning of audio streaming, people have been able to use streaming players to 'capture' and then replay (or redistribute) an audio file, which is illegal. It's nothing new, and it's not limited to Flip4Mac. But if you use the players as they're "meant" to be used, it's all fine.

Why single out that one player? Maybe they were alerted to someone's regular misuse of it; if someone is recording and re-posting WNYC shows on another site using that player, this would be the only way they could stop it, short of reporting them to the copyright police, which isn't easy in an anonymous online world.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 9:59am

Re:
No because NPR/WYNC/public radio doesn't have commercials. Now if its pledge drive week that is another story.
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That Anonymous Coward (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:01am

Re: Re: Re:
Oh hurm...
If it was something you paid for on iTunes I could see the streaming service fighting against it. But as it is free, they are just morons.

Another victim of the "on the internet", where everything online has to be infringing and stealing trillions of dollars.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:09am

Re: They're not saying timeshifting is piracy.
So punish the tool and not the person using it? If that is the case the person in question will just use a different app to capture the FREE STREAMS and give them away free.

I guess you could say if people are getting them somewhere else then WNYC doesn't get the webtraffic of the person downloading them. But instead of attacking a particular tool that someone uses to add value to the broadcast they should look at why people use a different site instead of WYNCs and then add the features that people are going to that other site for.

Because if the reason is as you suppose, someone is capturing the steams and reuploading them on his site, with the ability to pause/FF ect it will only be a day or two until he gets another tool with which to do so.
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E. Zachary Knight (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:11am

Re: They're not saying timeshifting is piracy.
So why punish the people who aren't breaking the law in order to maybe set up a roadblock for the one person that is breaking the law?
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:12am

Re: Re:
The pledge doesn't make it into any of the streams I have listened to. They just have a 10 second spot tacked onto the beginning and end of the show that says "thanks for listening to X please support us at Y, and check out Z" Usually done by the actual people on the show and changed regularly, so its not just some generic station ad.
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silverscarcat (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:20am

Re:
"polly want a cracker BAWK"

Here you go, polly! I'll hand you a cracker.
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That One Guy (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:24am

Re:
They don't say time shifting is illegal, they say that tool CAN be used for piracy. It probably IS being used for piracy by others.

Ah, so now we're in the business of making things illegal because they might be used to break the law, I see. Well, that should be simple enough, only have to get rid of a few things:

Cars...
Bikes...
Knives...
Guns...
Anything you could possibly use to harm someone with...
TV's...
VCR's...
DVD players...
Any electronic device in existence...
The mail system...
The internet...
Any and all drugs...

I'd go on with the list of things that might be used illegally, but I'd completely wear out my keyboard long before I got anywhere close, even with vague categories like I listed above.
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That One Guy (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:32am

Re:
Yes their stance is incredibly stupid, however referring to the woman(or anyone really) as a bitch is still uncalled for, and undermines your argument at the same time by making you look immature.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:33am

Re: Re: Re: Re:
Webtraffic is the only way anyone makes any money of these streams. I can only imagine that someone was offering the streams with these added features and the company that posts the streams to WYNC's website and hosts them does not want to go about adding these features. So they block the useful app to try to get some of the traffic back.

But even that doesn't really make sense. There are at least 6 ipad apps I can think of that would let me stream that content without looking at WYNCs homepage.

So now I can only assume that someone has a personal or competition problem with this particular app.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:35am

Re: Re:
Agreed, that letter will accomplish less than nothing.
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btr1701 (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 11:13am

Re:
> You have overused those phrases to the point
> that they are meaningless

But 'piracy' is still a-okay, right? Apparenlty, that one hasn't been overused and isn't on your little list of auto-skips.

Get real.
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Kevin Clark, 9 Apr 2012 @ 1:43pm

WNYC has recently launched its own iOS app, and promises an android version soon enough. This is as distinct from the NPR News app that already streams much of its content. The outside developers who wanted to block the other app were worrying about competition with their own offering. If they'd couched it as if they were changing the API access terms or something like that they'd be in much safer waters.
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Anonymous Coward, 9 Apr 2012 @ 5:58pm

Re: Whine
Yes. This is a crystal-clear case of management stupidity. The radio station relies on public donations, therefore they should be making their service as valuable as possible to its listeners. That way, more listeners will feel inclined to donate. They can make it more valuable both by producing higher quality programmes and by making listening easier.

No rational manager of a radio station should be aiming for anything other than the highest quality that can be achieved at a reasonable cost.

Time shifting is clearly a case of making listening easier. The fact that they have blocked it (How? Can that block be circumvented?), means that they are actually spending money to make their service less valuable. That will cost them donations. So some manager has decided to spend the station's scarce financial resources on driving away donations.

The board of directors should be frothing with rage at such foolishness. The manager who took that decision should be fired at once.
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Dave Frandin (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 7:14pm

Re: Re: Whine
Depending on the app, it could be trivial to circumvent the block.. There is an opensource program called "streamripper" that allows recording of streamed content, and sounds like thats what this program is also. Some stream operators don't care for streamripper connecting to their streams, so they block anything with a user-agent id with streamripper in it. Streamripper's configuration allows you to change how streamripper reports itself to the stream server, such as changing it to "mozilla firefox" for example.. Unless they want to block everyone using Firefox, this bypasses this brain-dead block easily...
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JMT (profile), 9 Apr 2012 @ 8:39pm

Re:
Wow, check out the sense of entitlement from this copyright maximalist who works for the legacy content industry performing Hollywood accounting!

You say Mike overuses the phrases, I say someone doesn't seem to like accurate descriptions.
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WB, 9 Apr 2012 @ 10:05pm

The DMCA in 17 USC 114 (d)(2)(C)(vi) requires webcasters to take steps to prevent recording, when feasible. This means that if the webcaster can easily block an app that can record, then they have to block it.

On the other hand, public stations are probably exempt to the DMCA's limitations on webcasters according to paragraph (d)(1)(B)(iv).

I am not a lawyer.
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colin S, 10 Apr 2012 @ 3:41am

Radio copyright
I would be fascinated to hear what element of the wireless broadcast they feel is their copyright. The content belongs to someone else, as does all third party produced advertising. The logos and brand names belong to the trade mark owners and the broadcast, lacking any material form, seems incapable of being copyright per se. So what the hell do these people see as the basis for this nonsense? About time some people gave this some serious thought.
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Guillaume (profile), 10 Apr 2012 @ 7:10am

Time shifting actually increases value of radio
I am running (in my spare time) a business that is providing time shifting (podcasting) services to radio stations, so I can attest first hand that it massively increases the value of radio.

A station that adds an archive tipically gets an increase in web site traffic of 5% a month, and downloads usually doubles every 2-3 months. Linking and comments on the content usually also increases massively.

So instead of blocking users from time-shifting, they should encourage it !
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Anonymous Coward, 10 Apr 2012 @ 10:55am

Mike (and Trey, and the rest of the Outrage Brigade) - How about taking a breath and assuming the most likely scenario - which is that the person in "donor relations" at WNYC who emailed Trey doesn't necessarily have the firmest grasp of why they might be blocking Flip4Mac. As other commenters have noted, WNYC makes a ton of their shows available for download a gazillion different ways. One can download an MP3 of most shows, or get one automatically downloaded through one of their podcast feeds. SO it's not as though WNYC is locking up their content to make it impossible to access.

If I were running a media outlet like WNYC, one reason I can think of for not wanting someone to use Flip4Mac or other apps to snarf streams is that, generally speaking, streaming is resource intensive - my server can only service so many listeners at a time, because it's very picky about latency, pauses, etc. So I would want to reserve live streaming of shows for people who are actually listening. It's not that I don't want people to be able to get an MP3 file of my shows -- it's just, I've set up a special server so they can get downlaod those files directly, on a server that can handle many downloads at a time.

The reasoning described above is just my speculation, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than the "piracy" explanation Trey claims to have gotten from WNYC's donor relations rep. I agree that that explanation is ridiculous, but perhaps everyone's ire should be directed not at the rep's cluelessness or better yet, directed at the pervasiveness of "piracy" as a cultural idea that the rep seems to have picked up by osmosis, so as to make her think that "piracy" would somehow be an adequate explanation for the policy.
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Michael Robertson (profile), 10 Apr 2012 @ 2:42pm

Radio thinking will evolve as TV has
When ReplayTV/Tivo invented the DVR concept there were howls from those in TV industry about how it was stealing and would decimate their industry. Now with 10 years of experience even the most conservative have realized that the DVR has been a tremendous boost for the TV industry. Last night during Frozen Planet on Discovery I saw a teaser REMINDING me to set my DVR to record all future episodes.

Radio executives must go through the same learning curve. Hopefully it will be faster because the DVR has blazed a trail, but it's expected to find some of the same thinking we say in the early days of the DVR.

http://DAR.fm is a cloud based recording service that has a database of about 20,000 shows all of which are recordable and then playable on demand. WNYC is one of the available stations.

The biggest threat to the radio industry is other media activities (social networking, games, TV, etc). They'll need all the technology possible to keep their share of people's attention to make money selling ads.
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techflaws.org (profile), 12 Apr 2012 @ 2:48am

Re:
when feasible.

Which it practically never is. I can use Streamripper and tell it to mask itself as Firefox. How will they ever know the difference?
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