Licences Advice

This page aims to put the various licences that URY follows into simple key points. It includes hard rules as well as tips and notes to make being legal easier.

Ofcom Licence

This is the first one most people think of when "radio" and "licence" come to mind, but believe it or not, now we have a licence (It's a Community LPAM one, if you're interested), it's pretty straight forward. Once a year, we pay a licence fee, every 5 years we renew the agreement, and the only fixed legal requirements are that:

• We broadcast across campus on 1350AM within reasonable technical standards (i.e. we don't interfere with maritime broadcasts, as we once did a few decades ago.... whoops)
• We don't mention that on air that we can be potentially be heard elsewhere depending on various complicated science things
• We broadcast the station frequency (1350AM) and callsign (VERSITY or URY) once an hour
  • Yes, saying "Online at ury.org.uk and across campus on 1350AM, this is URY news" is a legal requirement!
• Our output is target for students and staff at the University of York

You were expecting more? That's all the legal bits. You thought swearing was against Ofcom rules? It's not. Everything else you hear about is in fact based on Ofcom guidelines. Thick, boring documents giving you examples of what is good and bad and cases where broadcasters have done it right/wrong in the past. Our presenter contract is a conservative way of meeting all this while not boring presenters with detail. So if you want to know more about what content a show can have, it's useful to look at the Ofcom Guidance pages for more information.

PRS/PPL Licencing

This is where it gets... fun. The big problem with radio is copyright - if we just played music on air and online we're being very very naughty. We have to pay the artists, publishers, distributors and so on their share every time you click "Play" in the studio. For this, we pay licences to two separate companies - PRS and PPL, each of which handle part of those payments.

PRS Webcaster Licence

This one's simple - we're small and non-profit so other than a licence fee every year we don't have to do anything.

PPL Webcaster Standard Licence

I've lost large parts of my life to these guys. Once a quarter, we have to send them a report of every track we've played, including the record label and distributor, as well as some complicated statistics involving listener-hours and performances by territory. This would be great if it weren't the fact that we don't have all this information for most of our songs yet, and that we allow specialist music shows to play their own songs (we'll get on to that...). In addition to this, there's lots of other annoying little requirements:

• We have to show what song we are playing on the website (and over AM if it every becomes reasonable for us to financially)