Satellite radio is the wave of the future. Higher-quality broadcasts, digital feeds, no commercials, and hundreds of channels. Even the equipment is cooler -- most interfaces display the names of the songs that are playing and can provide other information. It's just awesome.
Of course, if you want to listen to it, you have to buy a satellite receiver. Which is understandable. But then you have to pay an additional monthly subscription fee. Which is not understandable.
What if I were to walk down the street, screaming at the top of my lungs? It would irritate my neighbors, sure. But they'd get even more irritated when I told them that they had to pay me for the privilege of listening.
That's exactly what satellite radio is doing! A satellite broadcasts across a huge chunk of the country. The satellite broadcasts through my air, and through your air. The radio waves it emits might even now be causing cancerous mutations in our cells.
The government intervenes to ensure that companies don't step on each other's frequencies. Otherwise we would end up with an entire spectrum of unusable space, as companies block each other out. But there is no clear reason for the government to enforce the companies' decisions to lock their content and charge for it.
If I build my own receiver and write some software to decode the signal, why should that be illegal? If I broke into Sirius' corporate headquarters and stole the specs for their encryption, fine. Are they arguing that the encryption method is patented? I bet they never filed for the patent on it.
Hrm.