RIAA Sues XM Satellite Radio

skayell writes "The RIAA is suing XM Satellite radio contending that the ability to store songs in memory makes it similar to an iPod, but with no income involved for the RIAA." From the article: "XM said it will vigorously defend this lawsuit on behalf of consumers and also called the lawsuit a bargaining tactic. [...] The labels are currently in talks with XM and its rival Sirius Satellite Radio, to renegotiate digital royalty contracts for broadcasts."

nhahahahahah

this makes me laugh... way to go riaa, sue a legitimate radio service

I can't get this song out of my head....

Now will RIAA sue me?

Your product resembles a legal product...

...but we don't get to make extra money off it (note: the artists / label were already paid for the song being aired, and recording off-air for personal use is covered by fair use law).

Wah! It isn't fair that we don't get to make more money, so it must be illegal.

Re:Your product resembles a legal product...

Can you back that up?

There's this little case called the "Betamax Case" that affirmed the rights of the public to record broadcasts for later listening. Perhaps you have heard of it? It gets discussed a lot on Slashdot.

What?

I can store songs in my memory and play them back at will fairly accurately. Am I at risk of being sued by the RIAA?

RIAA doesn't need XM's help

"XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings" - I don't think the music industry needs any help persuading people never again to buy their music - they're already doing such a fine job of that by themselves.

The last sentence...

"Everything is changing and the industry is petrified"

That just about sums it up.

Why stop at 'satellite' radio?

Variations on wavelengths, amplified and broadcast, take approximately 3 seconds from source audio to the listener. This cumilatively creates a 'storage medium' where anyone with a reciever can illegally intercept music. This of course can be resolved by renegotiated royalty payments.

That's $24.000.000.000

$150.000 per song, 160.000 distinct song offered per month... That $24.000.000.000 in potential damages. I think this day can be mark as the day when the RIAA finally lost it.

Re:That's $24.000.000.000

Yet still not QUITE enough to buy a PS3.

Precedent case perhaps?

I'd like to see how this holds up. From my understanding the RIAA has only been suing people it knows can't afford to go to court offering them "settlements" of large fines, though reduced from what they'd have to pay if they lost. Every time someone has stood up to them they've just tried to get the case dismissed.

If they're finally suing someone with an equal amount of lawyers and money, it should be an interesting legal precedent.

They're neglecting the sound quality...

"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings," the lawsuit says referring to the hand held "Inno" device.

This is similar to saying "once they have it in bad-sounding overcompressed XM format, they'll never want it in 16-bit linear". I have a hard time imagining this being the case. XM and Sirius both squish their content very hard to fit so many channels in their bitstream. If I heard something on XM and liked it, I'd probably run out and buy it on a released CD so I wouldn't have to listen to all the compression artifacts.

The war between sheet music publishers and piano roll makers, all over again...

Its not like the quality is that great...

Coming from an XM Subscriber, I wouldn't WANT to record the content from the service, as it is far from CD Quality. In fact, FM sounds better in a lot of scenerios... and I've been able to tape from FM for as long as I can remember.

Despite its quality issues, I like the XM service and am sorry to hear about this. XM is in enough financial trouble, so I've read in recent articles, and I don't think they need this. I doubt the RIAA will make them go under, but this certainly can't be good for the service.

As far as the RIAA, I'm wondering what's next. I'm thinking they're going to sue Amazon for those 30-second 32kbps sample clips they have from CDs. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some smart-ass exec at RIAA is reading this right now, and just yelped "BRILLIANT!" at the top of his lungs.

Re:Digital = infringing?

From the summery:

The RIAA is ...contending that the ability to store songs in memory makes it similar to an iPod, but with no income involved for the RIAA.

So this is different, apparantly XM subscribers can store songs on the unit.

Still ridiculous, of coarse, after all anyone with a computer or a cassette deck can accomplish the same thing.

Re:Digital = infringing?

Oh boo hoo hoo, cry me a river. RIAA, not everything has to give you money. Not everything is GOING to give you money. Give it a rest.

To the poster I'm responding to: yes, I thought of that; a lot of radios out there can record from radio to tape, or maybe some can record to hard drive (like the RadioShark) or to removable media of some kind. But if being able to store part of the broadcast is a bad thing, as said ... why didn't the RIAA sue decades ago?

I think it's because they know the suit is baseless. It was ruled legal decades ago to timeshift, after all, and being able to record broadcasts for later playback is nothing more than that.

The RIAA is just trying to capitalize on the technical illiteracy (overall) of judges and juries, I think.

Hey, can I start suing random companies now because their business models don't involve giving me money?

Re:Digital = infringing?

>Hey, can I start suing random companies now because their business models don't involve giving me money?

No. You're not rich enough. It would be illegal.

Re:Digital = infringing?

As FM and AM broadcasts become digital a "lossless" technology to record them will be just around the corner (if not already). I wonder how the RIAA plans to stop /that/? Also, can TV stations sue my cable company becasue I can save stuff to my DVR and watch it over and over again without buying a DVD of it? I think once they cross into this gray area it will be difficult to figure out exactly where to draw the line.

Re:Digital = infringing?

but with no income involved for the RIAA.

15 minutes ago, I took a shit. I am concerned that I may be sued becuase of course, there was no income involved for the RIAA.

It's about leverage

So why aren't they suing every radio station in the country, and why haven't they been doing this for decades?

The last thing the RIAA wants is a level playing field, because if one existed, their leverage would disappear. With radio, they can still engage in payola [wikipedia.org] practices. With XM and Sirius, they're dealing with entities that would rather control their own destinies, rather than suck on the RIAA's teat. It's not that XM and Sirius are digital, but that they are nation-wide and multi-channel. The RIAA can bully individual stations with impunity, and even the big guys like Clear Channel play along because they've essentially bought into the cartel. But XM and Sirius aren't part of the cartel, so the RIAA is giving them a shot across the bow. The message is: "Join the club, or we'll take you down."

Re:Is it just me

"...XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings,"

With the quality of the Plaintiff's music, I think that's a given.

RIAA-world math

"...Because XM makes available vast catalogues of music in every genre, XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings,"

Unless someone invented some sort of new way of compressing and storing broadcasts, by my quick math, figuring an average of 4 minutes per song, a user would need 214 Inno's to record the "vast catalog" and never have to buy music again. And this doesn't include any new music that comes out from this day forward.

Only in RIAA-world do the suits think the average consumer has $77,000+ (for 214 Inno's at $360 each) to plunk down right now, plus 63+ weeks to spend 24/7, recording entire catalogs of music.

It's a limited storage device with even more restrictions on moving content than cassette/CD have now, and they're already proven legal in piles of court cases. You almost have to wonder if RIAA has any income stream, given how hard they're trying to make money through the legal system.

Re:Is it just me

The problem here is that they've flat out said what the cynics have asserted all along: the RIAA believe they should be paid every time anybody hears anything. He didn't take it out of context. He identified the context RIAA are trying to establish: that to shuffle papers and holler and scream in the press and drag people to court and demand everybody's money for work other people did forty years ago somehow makes them useful members of society.

It's real simple. They're not the only ones caught in this bind. There are too many people on this planet, and not enough useful to do. It's hard to tell thousands of people to go practice the frenchfry question. Nobody wants to do that. Nobody. So we leave niches open for them. They can play War on Some Drugs, or be Direct Marketers. "Deficits are meaningless. Reagan proved that." That's one of the guys running our sock puppet. Translation: at the level of national policy, money has long since been utterly decoupled from value. The name of the game has become musical rice-bowls, and most politicians are rice-bowl manufacturers. The RIAA are hoping they can get another before the music stops.

There's no question that recording a copyrighted broadcast is legal. It's legal. Distributing that recording isn't; performing that recording in public isn't. That attempt to categorize the mere possibility of recording off a broadcast as "disseminating" is another reframing attempt, exactly like you're trying to do with "legitimate".

Re:Finally

... a worthy opponent against the RIAA. I hope XM tears em a new one.

Why would they? If it's going to cost them 10 million to "tear em a new one" in court, or 0.5 million in re-negotiated royalty fees, the choice is pretty clear. I'm not too up on corporate law, but it may be possible for shareholders to sue the directors if they tried to fight this when it was more economical to cave in. Warchest or no, companies are made to be profitable. It doesn't matter if they're the RIAA, XM, or Wallmart, they're not going to pay to fight someone else's battle.

Expect this to be over very shortly as XM and the RIAA sort out a new licensing deal. The legal threat is just a strong-arm political tactic by the RIAA.

Re:Finally

If it's going to cost them 10 million to "tear em a new one" in court, or 0.5 million in re-negotiated royalty fees, the choice is pretty clear.

I suspect the re-negotiation fees are meant to be a more permanent income stream for the RIAA meaning they want something recurring per song or per month.
In the long run, this fee will be more expensive than any court fee.

Re:Recordable

I think the one broken leg that RIAA has is songs are recorded in the memory, so it's not a traditional radio broadcast.

I wonder if RIAA won this case, would it affect MP3 players which allow recording of radio?


No, and yes...

MOST XM receivers DO NOT have the ability to store songs, they only buffer a few seconds. The exception is a few of the newer portable units and higher end deck units.

I would esitmate 90% of the XM customer base has the traditional XM Receivers with ANALOG outputs, even though the units are receiving a digital broadcast.

So in this sense, XM is NO different than other radio stations.

The problem I think they are trying to use against XM is that it provides so much music content at single time, that you can usually find a song you like to listen to, or a talk show you want to listen to. So this is where this scares RIAA.

However, Cable & Sat. Companies have provided 100s of music channels in the same capacity, and hence yet, we don't see RIAA fighting them, because they know they would easily lose based on the fair use rulings from VCRs in the 80s.

I can actually record songs from my Sat./Cable easier than from my XM, as we almost all have DVRs for our Cable/Sat. and even companies like Dish Network sell portable players that allow you to offload the shows/songs/content to portable players.

This is really sticky and said that RIAA think they can get away with this. XM isn't even the maker of the portable receivers that allow you to record the songs form their service, that is who the RIAA should try to go after in the first place, but again, this would go back to the VCR rulings because they are 'device' manf. and not content providers.

In an ironic story, Australia just legalized the 'fair use' of VCRs and DVRs this last week (even though people there have used them illegally). And back in the 'land of the free' USA, we are witnessing a regression of persoanl freedom once again.

We now have so much capability both analog and digital, that we all could record every album in CD quality using our computers etc, and this is just by pulling the songs from 'regular' broadcasts.

If the RIAA gets their wish, that is what we will end up doing rather than paying them money. We can then support bands and labels that don't support RIAA or send donations to the bands we like and bypass them all together. Becareful what you wish for, RIAA...

Sad...