Axehole

The Home Recording Rights Coalition (HRRC) is charging the recording industry with breaking earlier agreements with consumers, congress and courts because of its recently announced XM lawsuit. According to the HRRC, “the recording industry has now, via lawsuit, labeled its best customers as pirates and sought unprecedented tools to use against them.”

“I have a long enough memory to be astonished at the suit filed yesterday. We worked in good faith with the music industry to help pass the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA), based on personal assurances that I received that it would put an end to this sort of harassing lawsuit against private, noncommercial consumer conduct,” said HRRC Chairman Gary Shapiro. “Yesterday the major labels filed such a suit, against the use of devices clearly covered by the AHRA, without so much as a mention of the law that provides for royalties on these devices, and which was clearly written to remove even the threat of this sort of bogus lawsuit.”

Shapiro also accused the labels, and the entertainment industry as a whole, of abusing the assurances given to the courts, the Congress and the public at large when the industry pursued its Grokster lawsuit. At that time, according to Shapiro, entertainment industry representatives insisted that they did not by any means intend to threaten in-home, private, noncommercial recording.

“The lawyer that signed the complaint against XM is the same lawyer who told the Supreme Court that ripping a CD to a PC and then to a handheld device (without paying any royalty) is lawful,” adds Shapiro. “He represents the same industry that, in seeking ‘inducement’ legislation, promised that it would never be applied against devices such as a TiVo personal video recorder. But yesterday the complaint against XM claimed that consumers who use their devices in such ways are violating the copyright laws, and that XM is therefore guilty of inducement.”

“The action taken yesterday indicates that representations to the Congress, the courts and the public are not enough to assure that the music industry will keep its promises, to us or to the public and its elected and judicial representatives,” said Shapiro.

via HRRC