XM vs. RIAA: Another Useless Battle

Just a quick shout out to the Washington Post’s Steve Pearlstein for an astute article last week about the futility of the RIAA’s lawsuit against XM radio: A Sound Marketplace For Recorded Music.  To anyone vaguely familiar with tech or music issues, this should be a no-brainer but not for the majors and their minions it seems.  Savor SP’s closing thoughts: “Look, I’m still waiting for my kids to give me an iPod and teach me how to use it. My taste in music pretty much stopped with James Taylor. But if the goal here is to encourage innovation and competition in the market for recorded music, I can assure you that lawsuits and lobbying battles are a lousy way to go. The better strategy is to prune overgrown copyright protections, deregulate the industry and let the marketplace set prices and decide which companies and technologies and business models survive.”  Amen, bro…