Advertisement

No good deed goes unpunished by the RIAA: Cracking down on time-shifting XM Radio

xm

By now you might have heard about Scott MacLean and all the potential fun he could be having with the XM Radio legal department and the RIAA. See he wrote a little program called TimeTrax that took XM Radio broadcasts and dumped them directly onto his hard drive, neatly cut up into nicely tagged MP3's. Then, figuring that lots of people would love such a useful program, he started selling it. Silly Scotty. Guess he didn't realize that the RIAA frowns on anything that can "permit listeners to transform a broadcast into a music library." Guess they're not such big fans of the record button then. Or the fact that by extension TV lets viewers transform a broadcast into a video library.