In today's Washington Post, business columnist Steven Pearlstein tackles the nonsense that is the XM lawsuit. He dives right into the heart of the matter; that the record companies are cartels abusing their government granted monopoly to protect their antiquated business model at the expense of innovative technologies.

Here in Washington, there is nothing more amusing than watching business interests work themselves up into a righteous frenzy over a threat to their monopoly profits from a new technology or some upstart with a different business model. Invariably, the monopolists (or their first cousins, the oligopolists) try to present themselves as champions of the consumer, or defenders of a level playing field, as if they hadn't become ridiculously rich by sticking it to consumers and enjoying years in which the playing field was tilted to their advantage.

A recent example is the political and legal attack mounted by the music-recording industry against the upstarts of satellite radio.

That pretty much sums up the recent escalation of the Hollywood cartel's battle in Washington. First it was the DMCA, but they have opened new fronts with the IPPA (DMCA 2.0), SIRA, PERFORM, and a host of other terrible pieces of legislation that do nothing by enshrine in law their position as gatekeeper between musicians and their fans.

While they claim poverty and artist protection, they rack up record profits and continue to screw artists at every chance.

You'd think an industry that has managed to turn out so much mediocre music for so many years, done so much to lower moral standards and lost so much business to illegal file-sharing would have something better to do than attack some of the few distributors that are actually expanding the market and charging for music. But the prospect that the industry might not extract every last penny out of the new satellite radio services and their customers is simply unacceptable to the Recording Industry Association of America.

Wow. It's so rare to see this outside of the tech community, let alone the front page of the Washington Post business section. He's absolutely right by the way. The Hollywood cartels are dedicated to extracting every single red cent they can out of every single business that is even remotely connected to music. And if the business won't comply with their extortion demands, the cartels simply go to Congress and demand that the law act as their muscle.

The fundamental problem here is that there really isn't a free and open "market" for recorded music.

It starts with copyrights, which are nothing more than little government-issued monopolies. As a result of the recording industry's lavish political contributions, Congress has extended the copyright for music to absurd lengths of time (70 years after the death of the artist) and absurd situations (singalongs at Boy Scout campfires). This is well beyond what is reasonably required to meet the aim of encouraging artistic creation.

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The copyright laws also effectively set up the record labels as a cartel that can bargain as a group with satellite and Internet radio operators over royalties and other terms. Not surprisingly, the same cartel-like behavior appears to extend to the industry's negotiations with Apple's iTunes and other download services, which seem to strike suspiciously similar deals at suspiciously similar times with all of the major recording studios. It's perhaps no coincidence, then, that the industry has already settled an antitrust suit over price fixing of compact discs and is reported to be the subject of another antitrust probe regarding prices for music downloads.

Pearlstein acknowledges the obvious, the record companies are a cartel that artificially inflate the price of music. They are no different than OPEC except that the Hollywood cartels have the blessing of Congress to continue distorting the market, suing innovators, and imposing an innovation tax on all of us that enjoy music and technology.

Hopefully this will serve as a wakeup call to Congress members and their staffers that they've been duped by one of the greatest hype machines out there.