Pandora Required To Halt International Streams

Internet radio stations aren’t having the best of times at the moment. They continue to be astonished at the Copyright Royalty Board’s (Part of the US Library of Congress) decision to hike up the playback fees asked of them just as the medium is starting to catch on as a viable alternative to the FM and AM transmission methods.

One of the most popular venues for streaming audio, Pandora, has been among the parties who’ve voiced the loudest protests against the CRB’s planned rate hike (Originally scheduled to take effect May 15th, the new date for the upshift is July 15th), and has now had its days of bad news compounded by the fact that it is now required to bar non-US-based listeners from accessing its custom radio station engine “because of licensing restraints.”

The record labels themselves have raised the issue with international licensing with Pandora upon examination of the DMCA, or Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and state that if Pandora cannot adhere to licenses in place abroad, the company will be required to halt streaming to listeners outside the US. Actually, to be exact, Pandora has already put in place a “listener check” to understand where individual IPs originate from and block those deemed outside the boundaries of the US. The ban began on the 3rd of May.

We’re not sure how Guantanamo Bay figures into this measure.

To be fair, Pandora has never advertised itself as anything but US-only. The reason it gets flack for catering to an international audience is because it originally erected only a small firewall placed between service and user, which allowed access to anyone who had knowledge of a US-based zip code (area code, to some) to enter into a form during the registration process. The IP address check Pandora instituted recently can be subverted as well, though it is likely that far fewer individuals have the desire or wherewithal to connect to stations via a proxy, or a third-party portal (could be a PC, server or network of either or both) located within the US.

The SaveNetRadio.org lobby group has claimed that the rate hikes declared appropriate by the CRB “could be the death knell for the [internet radio] industry.” The official ban of all international listeners from Pandora only lessens the chance that the company will be around soon after the scheduled July 15th hike.