Congress Shall Make No Law ...

Way back in 1791 the founders of the United States agreed that the freedom of speech was just one right that Americans could not do without. They stated that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press".

Fast forwarding to the present, a new bill is up for consideration called the Broadcast Performance Royalty Tax, which might threaten that right established more than 200 years ago.

The heavily Democrat controlled United States Congress has been furiously debating the merits of the Broadcast Performance Royalty Tax on radio broadcasters; an interesting target for Congress and the White House to address considering that the American radio airwaves contain some of the most scathing voices of opposition to our current administration's policies.

To start things off, let's give a simple run down of what the bill entails. The Broadcast Performance Royalty Tax will impose a new tax on radio stations, forcing them to pay for the use of music, on top of the royalties they already pay to various other entities. The bill adjusts the amount radio stations must pay based on how much revenue they pull in each year.

This new bill has been a catalyst in creating new fears among Americans. Can this bill potentially be used by government to regulate "unwanted" speech, violating the First Amendment?

Well, according to an article written by David Oxenford, a partner with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, "Committee members desire to not imperil broadcasters by adopting a royalty - including a statement that the CRB would be instructed to take into account, in setting royalties, the impact the royalties would have on minority and female radio operators, small broadcasters, and religious and community stations".

For now, it seems that this bill is being used to generate tax revenue, not to put an end to opinions on the radio waves. It taxes the actual song by an artist; it does not tax a radio host's speech between songs, which is where opinions are usually disseminated.

However, minor changes to this bill can change that completely. What happens if our government happens to begin taxing one genre of music more than another? This tax hike within a select group of musical genres will cause radio stations, and by extension listeners, to avoid those types of music, potentially silencing the voices of the people who listen to that genre.

What happens after the government controls radio with taxation? Television? The internet? This is a very slippery slope we're traveling down, one that we need to watch very carefully.

By Katelyn Pavloff
pavloff@revolutioniptv.com