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Satellite radio device irks music industry |
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Written by asap
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Wednesday, 24 May 2006 |
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“This is the end of the inno-cence,” Don Henley is singing mournfully in my headphones. I’m listening to ’80s music on XM Satellite Radio’s new iPod-like device. The $400 unit, known as the Inno, is at the center of a blistering legal fight between XM Satellite and the world’s largest record labels — with listeners potentially caught in the crossfire.
What makes the Inno so worrisome to the music industry? It’s a portable satellite radio receiver, much like Sony’s Walkman FM players from a generation ago. XM’s subscribers can listen to any of roughly 170 channels of entertainment, sports and news programs, including 69 channels of different music genres without commercials.
But with a push of a single button, the Inno also can permanently record onto the device up to 50 hours of songs and automatically parses recordings by title and artist. Think of it like a TiVo for subscription radio. XM Satellite markets the device under the slogan, “Hear it, click it, save it.”
So, if you’re an XM Satellite subscriber and you record a favorite song — or even hundreds of them — are you still listening to music on the Inno? Or are you downloading songs to add to your personal music library?
The distinction is important to record companies because it affects how much money they collect under a complex system of music licensing. And some legal experts say it’s an important question for consumers because it could curtail the way we listen to music even over traditional radio and the Internet.
Now the issue is before a U.S. judge in New York. The record labels filed a federal lawsuit this week accusing XM Satellite of “massive wholesale infringement” because its subscribers can use the Inno to record music, not just listen to it. The lawsuit seeks $150,000 in damages for every song copied by XM customers using the devices, which went on sale weeks ago. The company says it plays 160,000 different songs every month.
The lawsuit does not seek directly any payments from or sanctions against XM subscribers who record songs. But the lawsuit accuses XM of contributing to copyright violations by its subscribers and inducing its customers to break the law, so it’s unclear whether consumers could eventually be sued, too.
And if the lawsuit were successful, it could raise the company’s costs, which could be passed on to subscribers as higher monthly fees.
XM says it will fight the case, that its Inno is innocent. It compares the unit to a high-tech videocassette recorder, which consumers can legally use to record programs for their personal use. It also says songs stored on the device from its broadcasts can’t be copied and can only be played for as long as a customer subscribes to its service.
The day after the music industry’s lawsuit was filed, AP got its hands on an Inno to see how one works.
The Inno, made by Pioneer Corp., is remarkably compact, smaller than a deck of playing cards, with a bright, full-color display that’s a bit larger than a postage stamp. At home or at your desk, the device rests horizontally in a cradle that charges its battery and attaches to an external antenna with a cord long enough to stretch across most rooms.
Once a subscriber tunes to a music channel, a single button press lets you capture a song as it plays, and it’s automatically added to your library and sorted by title, artist, channel and date it was recorded. As long as you’re not channel surfing, you can store a complete song even if you begin recording after it starts playing — thanks to a useful “buffer” feature. But if you tune to a new channel mid-song, you’re out of luck because the buffer resets itself each time you change channels.
Unlike traditional radio, songs over the XM service — which costs $12.95 per month — aren’t interrupted by advertisements. We did hear occasional disc-jockey chatter at the start and end of some songs, but this usually wasn’t captured when we tried to record music.
But unlike traditional Internet downloading services -- like iTunes, Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody or Napster -- we couldn’t quickly pull up songs from a particular artist when the mood struck. It might take hours or days before a song or artist fell into XM’s rotation, depending on obscurity.
Would the Inno replace my iPod?
We found the Inno a compelling new technology that will have some music fans salivating, especially ones inclined to rotate their music libraries with the latest hits. But among its biggest drawbacks is one of XM’s central legal defenses in its lawsuit: Songs captured onto the device can only be played on the device, and only for as long as a subscriber continues to pay $12.95 per month.
If we’re asked to pay for a copy of a song — the way the music industry wants — many consumers will want more flexibility to play their music on multiple devices and keep songs even after technology renders any one device obsolete. | Only registered users can write comments.
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