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.
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.
The controversy concerns new devices that allow satellite radio’s paying customers to record programs they listen to, or would have listened to if they were aired at a more convenient time, as a TiVo does for TV viewers. And like TiVos, these devices allow customers to keep the stuff they like and delete the rest.
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Heh I was blocked from the site for the rest of the story..
Yeah it seems like they want to kill XM with a fine that must be into the millions of dollars by now. I can’t see the harm in these recorders but maybe the RIAA wants to stop them now before they get features like connecting to computers or the net to share the songs or a cord to connect to your iPod or phone or a wireless connection that would be able to share play lists with others at the office or on the train.
The thing they don’t take into account once again is that like recording off of FM radio satellite has much the same compression limiting and processing that distorts the sound.
I can hear codec ringing high frequency phasing and other low-bit artifacts in the sound. To think you get anywhere near the quality of a CD is just wrong. They do give Howard Stern a lot of bandwidth on Sirius though they got the engineers to give his broadcasts a warm analog sound..
You may have to register with Wahingtonpost.com which is free and only takes a few minutes BTW to see the entire story.