Small Webcaster Community Initiative strives to maintain a fair balance between the intellectual property rights of songwriters and record labels and the best interests of our members who wish to use copyrighted musical works and sound recordings for creative purposes within their Webcast programming.

Despite its relative ubiquity, United States copyright law is technically deficient and in continual need of policy reform. We are committed to the investigation and oversight of both current and pending legislation which inhibits the legitimate public performance of copyrighted works under compulsory license and the licit non-commercial exploitation of publicly performed copyrighted works pursuant to the fair-use doctrine.

Through a comprehensive modernization of the U.S. Copyright Act, we intend to address many of these shortcomings as outlined in our core objectives:

• Allow use of legacy devices and media for Webcasting without undue record-keeping hardships.
• Revise Webcast programming requirements to be consistent with traditional public performance.
• Implement statutory protections for fair-use practices, including time-shifting and space-shifting.
• Create a compulsory license for live DJs to pursue commonplace adaptations of musical works.
• Expand the performance right in sound recordings to encompass terrestrial broadcast mediums.
• Curtail the unrestricted deployment of anti-consumer Digital Rights Management media formats.
• Abolish technological copy-protection measures from all commercially distributed CD-DA media.
• Codify non-commercial practices requisite for Webcasting, including backing-up and re-encoding.