I love my XM -- but sorry, guys, you are wrong on the music distribution issue. XM is radio, and charges its customers and pays fees to the content creators accordingly. If it is going to become a mechanism for transferring music to customers to keep in permanent storage, then both its payment and its fee schedules must reflect this.

For ex.: while in Montana last week, XM played a pleasant piece with which I was unfamiliar -- George Chadwick's Symphony No. 3. I recorded it to my 5-hour cache, played it a couple of times, and then ordered the CD from Amazon when I wanted to record other stuff. Would I have bought it if my storage capacity was in the Gigabytes, and permitted easy search? Of course not.

As technology changes, IP law must change with it, to fulfill the need to compensate those who furhish the content, and to provide a mechanism by which consumers can creative a collective system got sharing the costs of the system, with each doing his or her share and no one free riding.

posted by James DeLong @ 3:16 PM | Radio

Link to this Entry | Printer-Friendly | Email a Comment | Post a Comment(0)