XM radio announced it would create a version of its players that would let people record up to 50 hours of music that plays on their XM radios. Sounds great, right? Fun way to build a library of music you enjoy for long trips or commutes, and, after all, you’re already paying a subscription fee for the music — just as XM is paying a broadcast fee to the recording industry — so everyone’s happy, right?
Until the RIAA sues the snot of out XM for copyright infringement. Never mind that the technology falls well within fair use law, or even the 1992 AHRA law, which specifically legalized digital audio recording at home. And never mind that there’s essentially nothing different between what XM is going to allow and what you can do with TV shows and a VCR.
Which tells you where Big Media wants to go with laws regarding VCRs.
Inducement isn’t just for pirates anymore: In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in MGM v. Grokster, EFF warned that the newly minted “inducement” weapon would not be reserved for “bad actors,” but would also be leveled against legitimate innovators building the next generation of fair use technologies.
Sure enough, the complaint accuses XM of inducement based on the following statements in promotional materials: “Hear It, Click It, Save It!,” “[XM] delivers new music to you everyday and lets you choose tracks to create your own custom playlists,” “record with the touch of a button,” and “store up to 50 hours of XM.” Not exactly a pirates “ahoy,” is it?
The bottom line is that Big Media feel that any time you play someting that “belongs to them,” they should get money for it. Any use of it that they don’t get money for is theft. A personal recording, a time-shifting, something with a VCR or your TiVo, something you keep to share with family and friends or to enjoy in the future? That’s piracy. And anyone who creates technology to do it will get sued for, literally, billions of dollars.
O, brave new world …
Yes, it is so nice to be told that just because you bought the music, movie, etc. It does not mean you own it. It would be nice if the Industry would just be honest and tell folks that they are really leasing the thing that they just bought and that the company they bought the product from still owns everything.
But then they’d be open to all sorts of service levels and guarantees on the product itself. They’d also have to pay more to the artists, too, and we can’t have that.