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Well hell yeah: Wired’s Eliot Van Buskirk is reporting that webcasters are catching a major break from the egregious ruling handed down by the Library of Congress’s Copyright Royalty Board, which would’ve bankrupted most Internet radio providers and essentially shuttered the whole webcasting business for at least a few years. The public response to this unfair development has been big enough to get the generally techno-phobic U.S. Congress involved in sorting out the matter. Congress will be mediating discussions between a coalition of webcasters and the RIAA spin-off SoundExchange, which handles collecting and distributing Internet royalites. As of right now, the per-channel charge has been trashed—salvation for mega-multi-channel entities like Pandora—and SoundExchange has agreed not to collect the revised-rate back royalties that webcasters were going to have to pay on Monday.
