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UK Podcasters Association is a membership organisation which aims to represent the interests and protect the rights of UK podcasters. Basic membership is completely free.

By joining you will be able to influence the development of the podcasting in the UK, and help to give UK podcasting a greater voice.

All UKPA members receive advice by email on any topic relating to podcasting, professional guidance, legal issues, newsletters, and campaign updates.

Full membership costs £3 per month if you’re a non-profit making podcaster, or £120 per year for a business, and gives you access to UK Podcasters Association facilities.

Full members have access to research conducted by UKPA and made available to it via its affiliates, partners and other national and international podcast groups. Full Members can also access internal data which other members make available to the UKPA community. To become a full member you must first join as a free member.

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UK Podcasters Association One Year Old

Festivities break out all over podcastland, as the only UK national association for podcasters celebrates it’s first birthday today. True to the initial aims of the organisation, it continues to protect the rights of podcasters and promote podcasting, encouraging and mentoring at the grassroots level, and at the same time flying the podcast flag in the corporate echelons of mainstream media which podcasting has now joined and is steadily influencing.

“UKPA members are making all the running in UK new media, playing key roles in exciting and progressive projects. In business our members are making enormous headway, and we continue to grow as an organisation, both in terms of numbers and stature,” said UKPA Chairman Dean Whitbread.

Podcasting News

Podcasting News published a detailed explanation of the source of our rather lovely “Podcasting Is Selling Music” graphic.

John Buckman from Magnatune gives his explanation of exactly why the image works:

“I think is absolutely brilliant,” commented Magnatune’s John Buckman, who credits the UKPA with the design. “Podcasting is generally viewed as piracy and illegal by the RIAA, ASCAP and others, and they grudgingly give licenses to allow it in a very limited capacity (ie, 30 second samples). But, the reality is that it functions like radio, and helps sell music.”

About

UK Podcasters Association

The UKPA was founded in April 2006 by podcasters Dean Whitbread, Mark Crook and Paul Nicholls. It is a non-profit organisation with a membership composed of podcasting individuals and companies. UKPA’s remit is to both protect our members’ rights and promote podcasting.

Originally set up in response to licensing and legislative concerns, the UKPA represents more than one third of the independent podcasters in the UK.

In 2006, the UKPA was involved in protecting podcasters’ rights, lobbying the World Intellectual Property Organisation in Geneva, working with the Open Rights Group and the EFF in order to prevent the Broadcast Treaty from including podcasting.

UKPA members made the first concerted attempt in the UK to raise awareness in government about podcasting, promoting it’s value as both a social freedom and an important and fast-developing part of the digital economy.

In September 2006, members set the subscription at £3 per month for private podcasters, and £120 per year for professional organisations, institutions, and commercial companies.

To it’s members, UKPA provides podcast expertise, legal advice and access to the UKPA database. Full members vote on any major changes to the organisation, help to develop community strategies, organise skill exchanges, and share community and business information, research and other data.

UKPA relies on member subscription and voluntary donations for our funding, and members’ involvement for our success.

UKPA Trustees

Current Trustees of UKPA are:

Dean Whitbread (Chairman) Mark Crook (Secretary) and Paul Nicholls (Treasurer)

Affiliations

UKPA is affilliated with PodRepBod in Ireland and Podcastverband in Germany.

UKPA is a member of the Association of Online Publishing.

Contact

UK Podcasters Association Ltd, 24 Molesworth Street, Hove, East Sussex BN3 5FL

Tel: 0870 919 2807
Fax: 0870 052 7247
Email: yours [at] ukpodcasters [dot] org [dot] uk

UK Podcasters Association Ltd is a non-profit organisation.

It was formed as a Private Company Limited by Guarantee, Reg. No 5781367 on 13th April 2006 at Companies House, Cardiff, Wales.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

International Podcast Group

The UKPA along with affiliated organisations Podrepbod and Podcastverband have started the International Podcast Group.

Having set up the UKPA back in April 2006, affiliated to several other national groups, taken part the successful WIPO campaign, introduced the UK government to podcasting, advised several members in various legal and rights issues, and joined the Association of Online Publishers, we thought it would be a good idea to extend a democratic umbrella to podcasters internationally.

Our first aim is to form a collective global voice, democratically run, for the benefit of podcasters. If you are part of a group, and interested to be a founder member, we’d be glad for your involvement.

We are currently drafting our aims and we welcome input into this process.

Bye Bye, Britcaster, Hello National Grid

Popular UK forum Britcaster is to close 15th December, it was announced yesterday. Neil Dixon the man behind it, who now works for PodShow in the UK, has decided to pull the plug after two years.

A new forum, National Grid, is already in existance, set up by the UK Podcasters Association.

This UK Community Podcast forum is open to podcasters from anywhere in the world.

Sony Podcast Award

Next year’s Sony Radio Awards will include The Internet Programme Award, which has been created specifically for streamed, Podcast and download programmes. UK Podcasters Association has been pushing for recognition, and a category to include podcasting.

“We now have a more level playing field,” said UKPA Chairman Dean Whitbread. “Thanks go to Trevor Dann, head of the Radio Academy, who had the far-sightedness to organise a meeting with us on his first day in the job, and who persuaded me to join his organisation. It remains to be seen whether the award will go to one of the usual high-profile media suspects, or whether the judges will look at the great range of independently produced content that’s out there.”

Curry Wants A UKPA Tshirt

Photo by CC Chapman

This may thrill fans of the PodShow host, Adam Curry – about 14 minutes into his podcast Daily Source Code #504, he glowingly describes our fund-raising tshirt.

Tshirts cost £15. Leave comments here and we’ll process your orders – all proceeds go to the UK Podcasters Association – a non-profit company.

Swecasters Join Hands Across The North Sea

A new podcast group, Swecasters, has emerged in Sweden which we happily welcome into the national podcast group fraternity. You have to be a native Swede to join this group.

Two Victories at WIPO!

Via Gwen Hinze, EFF, and Glyn Wintle, Open Rights Group:

The negotiations have been tough (we hear), but the 2007 WIPO General Assemblies have come to a close with two huge victories for the public interest. On the Broadcasting Treaty, while the GA agreed to convene a Diplomatic Conference in November/December 2007, we now have two welcome safeguards in place (document after the jump).

First, there will be two more meetings of the SCCR to work through some of the issues on which countries are still clearly divided (Technological Protection Measures, and coverage of certain Internet transmissions) and a “pre-conference” before the November/December dipcon. In effect, this represents a rejection by the GA of the recommendation passed amidst controversy at last month’s WIPO Copyright Committee meeting (the SCCR). The previous schedule included only a pre-conference, at which nothing substantive would have been accomplished before a July Diplomatic Conference. The four month reprieve and two additional meetings are good news indeed. The full text of the decision follows, below.

Second, and most importantly, the GA’s compromise has an escape clause that allows for the convening of a dipcon *only if all outstanding issues are resolved* in those two SCCR meetings. By implication, for the first time, WIPO has indicated that there might not be a diplomatic conference and a new treaty if all member countries can’t reach agreement. An eminently appropriate outcome if countries are not able to reach agreement after almost nine years of negotiations.

It has also been decided that the treaty will now take a signal-based approach instead of the messy, dangerous rights-based approach that is used in the current treaty text. This, too, is good news for the Internet community, and reflects the concerns raised by many WIPO member countries at last month’s meeting. There’s much support for narrowing the treaty’s overbroad scope to signal protection. The key question will now be how the next treaty draft reflects this in practice.

The colossal effort required to broker this deal was recognized when the meeting’s Chair said, “I would like especially to thank Mr. Jukka Liedes, who must have lost a few kilos trying to work out this agreement.” Liedes, the Chair of the infamous meeting earlier in September that closed by an unpopular “silence as consent” procedure, was charged with finding a compromise at the GA, and appears to have done so this time.

On the Development Agenda, there’s good news also. The GA agreed to continue the dialogue, and most importantly, to keep all the issues on the table, not just those that have the support of the developed countries. The Assemblies agreed to extend the mandate of the Provisional Committee on Proposals Related to a WIPO Development Agenda (the now non-provisional PCDA).

And so we end this year’s WIPO General Assemblies with good news on all fronts. We’re mighty chuffed.