Hollywood cartels sue XM
Billboard is reporting about a new copyright infringment suit filed today in New York. From Billboard:
The major record companies have sued XM Satellite Radio over its XM + MP3 service claiming "massive wholesale infringement" of their recordings.
The suit, filed today (May 16) in the federal District Court in New York, calls the service a "digital download" service that has not been properly licensed.
I don't know why, but I'm surprised that the Hollywood cartels would sue XM. Right now there are only two things that drive music sales, iPods and satellite radio. The Hollywood cartels failed when trying to shut down the first MP3 players so they've decided to go after XM.
This is the innovation tax in action. Create a great new product that millions of people want to buy and watch the Hollywood cartels sue you while getting their allies in Congress to make your business illegal.
2 Comments:
The funny thing is, the Audio Home Recording Act already provides royalties to song authors and artists derived from digital audio recorders, but the recording companies don't get any of that.
What's more, the AHRA protects both the right for individuals to record for noncommercial use in digital formats and the right to sell digital recorders, as long as said recorders implement SCMS. The question here is (should be) not some lame, tired "digital download" argument, but rather whether XM implements SCMS as is required by law and whether they pay the appropriate royalties - not to the RIAA, but to the artists and authors themselves.
Not quite, Barry. They have to pay the royalties to the Register Of Copyrights, who then distributes it to the various parties entitled to it (and record companies get almost half of that, the other half of which goes to various classifications of artists). But, they aren't required to pay those royalties until the end of the calendar year (i.e., they have through February of 2007 to file those statements and pay those royalties). On the other hand, they should have provided notice to the Register of Copyrights that they were releasing a product they considered to be a DARD. I don't know whether they did that.
As regards SCMS, because the devices have no way to export or make further copies, it should be regarded as arbitrary whether or not they implement SCMS, as the device's copy protection (i.e. its lack of digital output capability) would have been approved by the Secretary of Commerce anyway (see RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems).
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