In the latest ruling, the Copyright Royalty Board judges denied all motions for a rehearing. They also declined to postpone the deadline by which the new royalties have to be collected. The one point of leniency allows webcasters to calculate fees just as they had been by average listening hours, as opposed to the new system of charging a royalty each time every song is heard online. The new per-song, per-listener fee structure goes into effect next year, the exception only lasts until the end of this year.

Webcasters are afraid the much higher royalty fees will put them out of business. CEO of Live365 Inc., a privately held company that aggregates audio streams from thousands of radio stations and other small webcasters, N. Mark Lam said that

Under the new royalty rules, “there is no industry.”

In an attempt to retaliate, several Internet radio broadcasters announced a campaign to raise awareness of the issue and encourage listeners to write to their representatives in Congress since they were able to receive relief from Congress in the past. A lawyer representing several of the webcasters say they will likely appeal the ruling, but the process could take up to a year. The head of the Digital Media Association, Jonathan Potter, supports this idea of taking it to Congress.

He sees “a lot of legislative support.”

The royalties in question only cover digital transmissions of music. Since traditional radio play promotes sales of recorded music for record labels, the royalties do not apply to terrestrial radio stations. Both digital broadcasters and regular radio stations pay a separate royalty to the publishers and composers of music.

This new service will help AOL capture advertising dollars from ads linked to search terms in text, in addition to the money it makes from display ads, such as banners. Raising online ad sales is the top priority at AOL, and it restructured its business last summer to offer most of its services for free. When asked about the subject, AOL Media Networks President Mike Kelly said,

“This gives us the opportunity to deepen our customer relationship and keep that growth rate going.”

AOL is one of the Web’s largest sellers of display ads, but it has fallen behind in paid searches. Google’s dominant text search technology has made it the most powerful advertising channel on the Internet. According to Jupiter Research, some 25 percent of online ad spending went to Google in 2006 compared with 8 percent to AOL.

The deal does not include the AOL Video search service yet, but they will likely be added over time.

AOL has used the term “Instant Messenger” since 1997, though several adversaries disputed the term “Instant Messenger” as a general phrase to depict text messaging services and platforms in general.

The USPTO overturned previous refusals in 2005, granting AOL the rights to the phrase. The USPTO decided that “instant messaging” remained generic, not Instant Messenger. The ruling said users related Instant Messenger to AOL’s AIM service. Webpronews could not reach a Yahoo spokesperson for a comment as to why Yahoo suddenly filed the opposition.