RIAA sues satellite radio broadcaster XM

By Steve Malone

Posted on 18 May 2006 at 10:57

The music industry trade association in the US, the Recording Industry Association of America, has filed a lawsuit against XM Radio, America's biggest satellite radio station alleging that it is promoting the theft of copyright material.

The dispute is superficially about the Pioneer-manufactured Inno device that allows XM subscribers to record up to 50 hours of material. This works out as around 1,000 tune's worth of XM content for playback solely on the Inno device.

Until recently, the RIAA and XM have been in negotiations to increase the royalties paid for the broadcast of music on the satellite service but recently these talks have broken down.

XM says that the lawsuit is simply another method of extracting more money through the courts. The RIAA says that the current XM licence is merely to allow streamed music in the same way as traditional radio and not to promote recording and unlimited playback.

Defending its action, the RIAA said in a statement: 'XM is playing a legal shell game by trying to morph a broadcast service into an ownership device. They are attempting to compete with an iTunes or Rhapsody model while bypassing the compensation made by those and other services to the music community.'

XM claims a 'fair use' defence and counters that it is merely allowing its customers to record the broadcasts in the same way that listeners have been able to record radio programmes for many years.

Apart from being seen as a negotiating tactic, the lawsuit is also being viewed as an attempt by the RIAA to extend the boundaries of intentional illegal copying technologies in the wake of last year's Supreme Court decision in the MGM vs Grokster case.

While Grokster had pleaded a 'fair use' defence and had succeeded in lower court decisions, the Supreme Court decided that 'fair use' was not a blanket shield against legal action and courts could not 'ignore evidence of intent to promote infringement'.

The lawsuit makes good on the threat issued by the RIAA last year, which warned that it planned to sue XM for a billion dollars alleging that, as with Grokster, the station was encouraging people to copy and distribute copyrighted content.