In less than two weeks, on May 21, an obscure federal bureaucracy called the US Copyright Office will accept or reject the recommendation of a controversial arbitration panel which has sided with the record industry's demands for webcasting performance royalties for music played. Urgent appeals on the matter--like the e-mails you're getting with headers like URGENT! and PLEASE ACT TODAY! seemingly begging for the delete key--are, for a change, no hoax, and no exaggeration. The outcome really could quite possibly be as apocalyptic as the warnings claim. All the Copyright Office needs to do is say yes.

The dispute between big record companies and big broadcasters caused most commercial stations to pull their webcasting from service for several months last year before a temporary compromise was worked out. Should the arbitration panel's recommendation be adopted, it would be a disaster for the ability of even large commercial stations to simulcast on the web. The royalties, similar to current ASCAP and BMI payments but to a theoretically worldwide audience, have been estimated by Arbitron Webcast VP/GM Bill Rose to be likely to cost a New York City music station something like $15 million a year--a quarter of such a station's annual billing from advertising.

But at least a big corporate radio station has billings; what the copyright decision could unquestionably mean is the death of music for Internet-only radio stations, which tend to be the province of music-lovers, nerds, activists, egomaniacs, and other small-time operators with a vision and the drive to make it happen. The beauty and the curse of the web is that anyone with the right software can tune in, if only they can find you; even the most popular Internet-only stations still have audiences comparable only to small-market on-air stations, but in theory they can reach the world--and that's what has the record industry scared.

Recall that National Public Radio and the National Association of Broadcasters pressured Congress a couple of years ago into gutting the FCC's Low Power FM proposal, so that it left the large urban cities most in need of breaking the corporate monopoly on media, like Seattle, as the areas least likely to be eligible for such stations. In the wake of that gutting, pirate radio--despite fierce, renewed FCC crackdowns--is making yet another comeback. (Funny thing about those public airwaves; the public keeps wanting to use them.)

Now, the NAB is getting a taste of its own medicine: corporate greed that is preventing it from reaching desired listeners. Don't feel too badly for them, though--they've still got free leases, with no accountability or need for public service, on mega-valuable broadcast properties that in theory use airwaves belonging to you and I. The real losers are musicians outside the mainstream, folks whose creations might be played on the Internet but not on stale commercial radio. And, of course, also left high and dry are those same media democrats who, unable to crack the airwaves, turned to the Internet to express themselves through radio, the most immediate of mediums, and who are now finding that potentially "illegal," too.

Time was when rock and roll broke the BBC's monopoly on Britain through offshore pirate broadcasters like Radio Caroline, and a generation of AM rockers grooved on Mexican clear channel stations that ignored American tastes in music and wattage. Can a generation of foreign Internet pirates be next?