Great explanations, thanks. Couple more questions:

analog FM radio (lossy, right?) > lossless digital recorder, MD or cassette is allowed

is digital XM (lossy) or Sirius satellite radio (lossy) > lossless digital recorder, MD or cassette allowed?

is the upcoming terrestrial digital HD FM (lossy) or HD AM (lossy) > lossless digital recorder, MD, or cassette allowed?

I really don't see much difference between a lossy webcast and a lossy digital radio broadcast, except maybe higher bitrates with the radio broadcast.

Finally, when are we going to get a lossless video codec? Are any of the video codecs used for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray lossless? From what I've read, MPEG2 is lossy and according to wikipedia, miniDV is lossy: "DV uses DCT intraframe compression at a fixed bitrate of 25 megabits per second (25.146 Mbit/s)...DCT compression is lossy, and sometimes suffers from artifacting around small or complex objects such as text." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MiniDV