So you’ve got old stamps lying around…

As you probably know, the US Postal Service is raising the price of stamps sometime in the next couple of weeks (I’ll confess that I don’t know the exact date). Since I don’t send a lot of letters to begin with—and send even less now that I use online bill pay—I realized that I’ve got half a dozen stamps sitting around that will still be useless.

Rather than simply tossing them out like I usually do, this time around I decided to do something constructive. I spent about ten minutes this afternoon writing a letter to Michigan’s senators and my local representative asking them to support the Internet Radio Equality act recently proposed in both the House and Senate. Because I know that the majority of you don’t give a crap about Internet Radio one way or the other I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s sufficient to say that if a recent fee increase by the Copyright Royalty Board is allowed to stand pretty much every streaming radio station on the net will be bankrupted. This is, of course, exactly what they want to happen, because the CRB is strongly tied to the RIAA and I think we can all guess why they’d want this entire technology squashed.

More than just excellent music sources like Pandora and ETN, though, this is a big deal for my favorite podcast supplier: National Public Radio. NPR has been providing their broadcasts free over the Internet for a few years now, and in a place like Houghton (whose NPR affiliate only broadcasts for about 4 hours a day) this is practically our only connection to the network. Even if you don’t like NPR, particularly, every radio station that has a streaming net counterpart is in jeopardy.

In any case, if you enjoy any of the thousands of streaming services that can be found on the net I urge you to write your own letter and make good use of your soon to be obsolete stamps. You can even look at mine (after the jump) if you’re short on ideas.

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