Live365 Green Room Visitors, Beware....

I just hadda drop a quick message in the blog regarding one of my recent (and fortunately brief and sparse... see last entry) visits into the Live365.com Community's Green Room (forums.live365.com-- obviously, the IT people there, like most of the community's usership, have no appreciation for Latin). This has been the 2nd visit in the last, oh, two weeks, and it's also the second time in as many visits I've seen some really crappy pseudo-legal advice being passed off by one or more of the pseud0-know-it-alls who occupy the Green Room and try to convince people they know what the hell they're talking about.

WARNING: if you are a Live365 broadcaster and are in need of legal advice regarding your station, you should not be asking it in the Green Room, where you're likely to get five people respond who will ALL give you very, very dangerous opinions and pass them off as authoritative information. You should instead do one of two things very, very quickly:

(A) email Live365.com's legal department and make an official inquiry of them. Not only is it their service and therefore their rules which govern, but if they give you wrong advice, at least you can plead "substantial reliance" and implead them as a responsible third party when someone sues your pants off because you did something in violation of the DMCA, patently stupid, or both. Or...

(B) contact your own legal counsel, licensed to practice law in your own state or other jurisdiction, and preferably it'll be someone with some Intellectual Property, internet or new media or other similar practice experience. Ask them if you can do what you want to do. Better to get an answer out of someone who's actually gone to law school and knows how to read both statute and case law than it is to place the well-being of your station (and potentially every penny you have as a private individual) in the hands of respondents in a chat room who tell you patently wrong things. And worse still, who leave a printed record of their advice regarding how to try to "skirt the law" for anyone-- including RIAA or SoundExchange counsel-- to come along and print any time they darned well please. :)

OK, so WHY didn't I put this information in the Live365 Green Room itself? I contemplated it.... but if you read my earlier message, you know that I've been a much, much happier puppy of late not having to deal with the waves of uncontrollable grief that place perpetually produces (I was beginning to feel like Marvin the Robot from Hitchhiker's Guide, in fact!). If I posted what I would have intended as a helpful bit of advice in there, there'd be 12 responses the very next day-- mostly from the pseudo-know-it-alls who have to try to legitimize themselves as the "big, experienced long-timers" in the forum so as to impress the newer broadcasters-- telling me that I was trying to scare people, or that "law X" was clearly unconstitutional, or that it's clear according to THEM that intentional skirting of relevant federal copyright law is perfectly OK as long as it "seems" random (and, as noted supra, this argument would be in writing...chuckle).

So better to put it here for anyone who actually WANTS to stay safe and legal-- or who at the least prefers more reliable, realistic "it's a toss-up" advice to the certainty of a quick, clear, simple and probably WRONG two-word answer-- and in addition, I don't have to let any of the folks who really get on my nerves with their two-word answers argue the toss over here and confuse those in search of information any more than they already have. :)

Happy rest-of-the-weekend!

Zeb