RIAA Goes After Satellite Radio

nicholasjay writes "The RIAA is at it again. Now they don't like satellite radio. From the article 'The record industry ... believes the recording capability [of satellite radio receivers] is a clear copyright violation and could take revenue away from paid download music services.' This comes on the heels of both Sirius and XM announcing mp3 enabled players and the ability to record music heard on the radio. Also from the article: 'RIAA may seek $1 billion plus in music rights fees for a new contract covering 2007 to 2012 to replace the current $80 million pact that expires in 2006.'"

Comments

Not the time to buy xm then eh?

[cflorio]

If this contract expires in 2006, then I'd say I'm not going to be buying an xm radio system any time soon. Increases like that would either have to be passed on or xm would go tits up.

I hate the RIAA

[Donniedarkness]

"The record industry ... believes the recording capability [of satellite radio receivers] is a clear copyright violation and could take revenue away from paid download music services."

So satellite radio might hurt downloadable music, which the RIAA wants to kill, also? Honestly, I hate the RIAA...Satellite radios let you record music? You know what? So do cassette tapes... and they have, for years.

Re:WTF?

[SilverspurG]

I don't see how the sattelite radio equipment makers can be thinking straight in this matter.

Other way around. How the fsck could the big record labels not know in advance what hardware was going to be used? If they had a problem with the recording security of the hardware they could have refused to grant the service broadcast rights for their music.

Simple as that. No lawsuit needed. No wasted taxpayer money. No more overpriced attorneys.

Re:Some currently available mp3 players

[xhorder]

But it's highly compressed... I would hardly call it "perfect"

Same argument as the VCR

[ploafmaster general]

Seems to me that these XM recording devices are rather like having a VCR for your radio. If it's legal for consumers to time-shift their television entertainment by recording it, why shouldn't the same apply to radio?

Re:No kidding?

[SilverspurG]

Radio NEVER has had to pay RIAA.

Don't most radio stations have agreements with the various record labels? I seem to remember someone taking care of that paperwork...

Grokster comes back to bite us.

[Jaywalk]

The Supreme Court changed the rules and the RIAA is trying to use it to prop up their broken business model. As Lawrence Lessig observes, the old rule was that a technology was okay if it had "significant non-infringing uses." But, in the Grokster ruling, they ruled that Grokster was illegal because it was the service was "promoting" infringement. The RIAA apparently figures this is their license to go after any technology which does not promote their business model.

Re:The beginning of the end

[jim_v2000]

Obviously they are trying to keep their distribution model valid (read crappy CDs)

I vowed earlier this week to never buy another music CD. I ordered a new album of a group I like from Half.com and got it in the mail the other day. I then put it in my computer and tried to rip the music off as MP3s so I wouldn't have to put the CD in my machine all of the time. However, my ripper of choice (Wimpdows Media Player) wouldn't see my cd drive as having anything in it. I though the cd had some kind of protection on it that wouldn't let my machine read it. However, it opened fine with the little player they included...so I tried another ripping program I found online. That pulled the tracks off, but they sounded like static. Then I stumpled across something on Google that mentioned new music cd's installing something on people's machines called "Plug and Play Manager". I checked my running services and sure enough, there it was. Some more research turned up that somehow, from what I understood, it integrated itself with the IDE drivers for my CD drives, and then wouldn't allow any applications other than their shitty player access to the cd. Well, I worked for Symantec awhile ago, and I figured that if I could get viruses off a machine, I could get this thing off.

Well, first of all, this "Plug and Play Manager" runs as a service. And you can't stop the service. You can't end task on the process that the service starts. I couldn't even see the files that it uses, because they are stored in a folder that starts with $sys$... which apparently I could only see from the command prompt. And even tehn, I could only delete the files in Safe Mode w/Command Prompt. AND THEN after I deleted those files and cleared out the registry keys, when I tried to restart my computer, it started to load my cd drivers and rebooted again. Even in safemode. And the Windows repair feature didn't help. I ended up having to format/reinstall Windows.

Talk about bitch DRM...I was pretty pissed. I bought the damn music, and it happened to come on a CD. If I want to copy the music that I purchased onto my computer to listen to it, that's my business. The RIAA can kiss my ass. I'm never buying another one of their disks again.

It FINALLY happened

[gosand]

Did everyone miss the fact that this is one of their concerns: "...violation and could take revenue away from paid download music services."

We now have the RIAA defending and fight for music download services? Funny how the worm turns, it only took them about 10 years to recognize music downloads as "valid".