This morning, Bryan Jay Miller from WOXY.com testified before Congress about the Copyright Royalty Board’s recent rate hikes. Check out his testimony:

Read more about this morning’s proceedings here, and watch the rest of the testimony here.

In case you hadn’t heard, hundreds of Internet-based broadcasters are going silent tomorrow to draw attention to the controversy surrounding new royalty rates put in place by the United States Copyright Royalty Board.

I wrote about this situation on my other blog a few months ago. In short, the Copyright Board has decided that Internet-based broadcasters - which includes everyone from Pandora to WOXY to the teenage kid who creates a streaming radio station on his home computer - will be required to pay sound recording royalties that (a) are higher than those paid by satellite radio, and (b) even more egregiously, are not paid at all by regular terrestrial radio stations.

These new royalties threaten to put many webcasters, even larger established players, completely out of business. Pandora has estimated that the new rates, which are retroactive to 2006, will force it to pay more than $2 billion. No matter how you look at it (and, personally, I see the Copyright Board’s decision as being influenced by Clear Channel and other large broadcasters who want to price out the growing competition from Internet broadcasting), it is clear that the future of Internet radio is at stake.

In an effort to bring attention to this situation before it’s too late, webcasters, including Pandora, WOXY, Radio Paradise, MTV Online and Yahoo! Launch, among many others, are all going silent tomorrow. Sadly, one large online player, Last.fm (recently purchased by CBS), does not appear to be participating.

Here’s hoping that tomorrow’s day of silence is the last time that any of these stations go silent for a long, long time.

Learn more about the royalty situation here.

Whatever your politics, you gotta admit, this is funny. The quick background, in case you missed it, is that not-yet-presidential candidate Fred Thompson criticized Michael Moore for filming part of his new documentary in Cuba. Moore then responded by challenging Thompson to a debate on health care, and criticized Thompson’s habit of smoking cigars (which Moore suggested were Cuban cigars).

This is Thompson’s response. Good stuff. Not sure how presidential it is, but I’ll leave that issue for another day.