News written by Rich Fiscus (July, 2009)

Last week PRS for Music, the UK performance royalty collection organization, announced revenue for terrestrial broadcasts and internet streaming in the first half of 2009 was down 6 percent from last year.

PRS for Music collects royalties for close to 60,000 songwriters and music publishers.

An official statement blames "phasing of revenues" for lower than expected earnings, but conveniently doesn't mention the loss of income from YouTube earlier this year. In March, while PRS for Music was renegotiating royalty rates with YouTube, the world's biggest online video service began blocking access to most music videos for UK viewers.

At one point last year YouTube was reportedly responsible for 40 percent of PRS members' video plays. It's hard to imagine that the loss of their royalty payments since March wasn't a major contributor to the revenue decrease.

In May PRS for Music announced new streaming royalty rates, which took effect at the beginning of this month.

The per stream minimum dropped substantially, which should help smaller webcasters. At the same time the basic rate increased to 10.5 percent of revenue from 8 percent.

Jammie Thomas-Rasset will be appealing the $1.92 million judgement against her in the first RIAA file sharing case ever decided by a jury.

At issue will be the constitutionality of awarding $80,000 per song. US copyright sets minimum damages at $750 per song, but allows up to $150,000 for "willful infringement."

Attorney Joe Sibley told CNET News "She wants to take the issue up on appeal on the constitutionality of the damages. That's one of the main arguments--that the damages are disproportionate to any actual harm."

Although the courts have previously ruled that punitive damages in excess of ten times the actual damage caused are a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, there's no precedent on whether statutory damages are similarly limited.

The Department of Justice has already shown they are willing to defend the damages. Earlier this year a lawyer from the DOJ Federal Programs Branch, which is headed by former RIAA lawyer Ian Gershengorn did exactly that in another case.

The HTML 5 standard won't include requirements for browsers to support particular audio or video standards according to Ian Hickson, editor of that standard on behalf of the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C).

Hickson's comments were posted on the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group mailing list. He attributes the decision to a lack of consensus among browser makers.

Previously there had been talk of making either MPEG-4 AVC or OGG Theora the officially supported video codec for use with the <video> tag.

Although Google has implementations of both included in their Chrome browser, Apple has apprently decided potential patent issues make Theora support risky and Neither Opera Software or Mozilla are interested in licensing MPEG-4 support.

Microsoft simply hasn't announced any decision on what standards they plan support.

If you're disappointed by this decision, the news isn't necessarily all bad. He was clear that he would like to revisit the decision when either Theora or H.264 manages to become a defacto standard.

Of course if that happens making it part of the standard is just a formality. But as Hickson pointed out, no one is likely to implement a particular codec just because the HTML standard says so.