It didn't take too long for CBS to go after their former cash cow, one Mr. Howard Stern, self annoited "King-of-all-Media", now that Stern has moved on to Sirius and moved away from the FCC and CBS censors and others that he saw as preventing him from doing "his kind of show."
CBS has, in case you've missed the news, filed a several hundred million dollar lawsuit against Stern and Sirius, charging various things, but basically summarized as a case of looking for money for the loss of Stern's services once he left, and looking for money for the free advertising that Stern supposedly did for Sirius while still collecting paychecks from CBS.
There are multiple problems for CBS in this attack though -- the biggest of which being that during the time of the issues that CBS is crying over, Stern was raking in record advertising dollars and bringing in very high ratings for his show pending the move over to satellite radio.
CBS had every opportunity to fire Stern, had every opportunity to censor him, suspend him, or otherwise discipline him, and actually did suspend him at least once and/or intervene in his show material to keep him from mentioning Sirius directly.
Worse for CBS, they actually pimped Stern on their own TV network, having Stern visit Late Night with Letterman several times in the interim period, where Stern handed Letterman a Sirius boom box and of course helped promote Sirius via his appearance on the show.
I don't see CBS winning this fight, but then again I don't have the lawyers that they have on retainer. I guess those lawyers needed something to do, and CBS has decided to give it to them, rather than going out and finding talent to replace Stern that actually would generate a real audience -- something that has definitely been lacking for the shows that are now airing in the old Stern time slots. David Lee Roth, Adam Corolla, and others have done nothing to generate any buzz, and because of it CBS is continuing to watch their audience disappear.
Thats my thoughts, feel free to add your own.
