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XM Satellite Asks For Copyright Lawsuit to Be Thrown Out

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 2:55 PM - by

Fighting a copyright lawsuit over its new handheld Inno device, XM Satellite Radio on Monday asked a federal judge to dismiss the case on the grounds that the 1992 Home Recording Audio Act protects it.

According to an Associated Press story, XM's lawyers said in their filing: "Congress' efforts to insure that the powerful recording industry would not be able to restrict the right of consumers to record songs that are broadcast over the radio or stifle innovation by chilling the development and use of the latest recording technologies."

XM's Inno, which some have compared to the iPod, can store up to 50 hours of music and has the ability to record and automatically organize music. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which XM said supported the 1992 law when it was passed, said that Inno amounted to "massive wholesale infringement" when it filed the lawsuit in May. It wants US$150,000 in damages for every song copied by an Inno user.

RIAA spokesman Jonathan Lamy called XM's legal arguments "arcane" and noted: "If XM wants to compete with iTunes, Rhapsody and similar music distribution services, it needs to obtain the appropriate authorization."

The Consumer Electronics Association, a trade association for equipment manufacturers, sided with XM Satellite, as did the Home Recording Rights Coalition. Where XM has dug in its heels regarding RIAA demands for distribution licenses similar to the ones Apple has for iTunes, its rival, Sirius, has paid for them to cover the devices it has in development.

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Tiger said:

member since 17 Jun 2003 with 1018 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:07 pm

Considering Sirius is XM's only direct, similar competition, and they paid up, XM is on shaky ground, if not legally, then at least on appearances sake.

What's good for the goose is good for the gander. At least usually.

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Mikuro said:

member since 15 Jun 2002 with 457 posts, unranked, send him a message or view his profile

Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:47 pm

$150,000 for every song copied?!? Sheesh. What ridiculous law says that makes sense? I'm so tired of the RIAA's little victim act. Nobody who's been found guilty of antitrust violations as many times as they have can get any sympathy from me.

I think XM's device is perfectly legit under current laws, but that hasn't always mattered much. Can the RIAA change the laws to suit them yet again? Time will tell.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 18, 2006 3:50 pm

Considering that Sirius caved into the RIAA's extortion, let's hope that XM will fight and win!!

Ironic, since the Inno has *already* been seriously hobbled - you have to select songs individually for recording while you're listening, and you can't offload audio to your PC! They have integrated "Napster to go" functionality, but if you want to save a song, or move it to your PC or iPod, you have to pay and you end up with Napster tethered downloads - who wants that? Not to mention that it you can't skip backward in the song list, you can't pause live radio, it only records 50 hours, and XM is lower-bandwidth then old-fashioned FM radio... in digital terms, 1 GB/50 hours = about 47 kilobits per second - listen to many 47 kbps songs on your iPod lately?

In comparison, Griffin's RadioShark can pause live radio, has unlimited recording, and doesn't place any restrictions on what you can do with the music.

On the internet radio front, Griffin's iFill records internet radio streams, breaks them into songs, and stores them in iTunes - so you can listen to them on your iPod!! And most internet radio stations are 96 kbps or higher, with many 128, 192 and 320 kbps stations.

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 18, 2006 4:03 pm

[Make that "lower bandwidth *than* old-fashioned FM radio." Darned typos. Anyway, as noted, XM has less hiss, but the music has been seriously compressed - down to something like 47 kbps, if you do the math!! FM stations give you 150 KHz of real analog *bandwidth*. It's hard to compare digital to analog, but you're getting a lot more information - certainly more than 1 bit/Hz - in FM than you're getting with XM. A good-quality FM signal is going to beat XM hands down.

Which is not to say that XM is bad - XM is great because of all of the great stations and music you can get!! Satellite gets around the Infinity/Clear Channel duopoly of radio mediocrity. It's really disappointing that a cool, albeit very limited, device like the Inno is being sued out of existence.]

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A guest said: (hide)

Tue Jul 18, 2006 6:37 pm

The recording act for personal use does seem to have some merit here and I hope that XM wins this one. I'm tired of the recording industry putting there hands in everyone's till for money and $150,000 per song is a rediculous penalty! Whatever happened to consumer rights? I guess we consumers haven't been black mailing enough senators to have them see it our way like the big record companies have.

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