Schizo Sony
If you’ve bought any Sony Entertainment DVDs lately, you might not be able to watch them, thanks to a new DRM scheme that Sony is putting on movies like Casino Royale and Stranger than Fiction. The weirdest thing about this is that even if you have a Sony DVD player, you still may be out of luck. This of course is coming just a few months after courts have handed down a harsh decision against Sony for it’s Rootkit debacle, where Sony CDs installed software on your computer without telling you, and then once it was made public, Sony’s rootkit uninstaller went ahead and installed “phone home” software without telling people.
I actually knew this kind of thing was bound to happen sooner or later back in the late 80s when Sony bought CBS Records and Columbia Pictures. From the MBA’s point of view, it seemed like a slam dunk… buy your Sony camera and watch your Sony TV and listen to your Sony walkman. The missing piece is what you’re watching and listening to… if Sony could sell you the songs and movies as well, it would be a synergistic combination that would…. well, the idea was it would make a lot of money. I don’t see what Sony’s customers get out of this.
If you want to know the problem with selling both songs and players, all you have to do is look at the iPod. When it started, Apple didn’t sell any music, and even now with the iTunes Music Store, Apple is still selling other people’s music. Compare the latest iPod with the Sony…. what do they call their player again? It’s still called Walkman? Really. Whaddya know.
Seriously, it’s that bad. Sony MP3 players are OK, as far as they go, but how many do they sell compared to Apple iPods? Sony owned the portable player market, and then digital media came long, and Apple jumped while Sony hesitated. Sony hesitated because even though their engineers could kick ass and make any MP3 player they wanted, Sony Entertainment could not get past the idea that someone might copy their songs. So they waited, and tried to make everyone happy, and so no one was happy.
So that’s where we are today. Sony Entertainment sells CDs that corrupt your hard drive with rootkits and DVDs that won’t play in your Sony DVD player. All in the name of preventing what they call piracy. In the process, Fair Use (which in the case of DVDs, I think includes watching them) gets lost, and video pirates get slowed down by about 30 seconds.
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[…] Original post by Mr. Alex […]
It’s really a shame that Sony has come to this and because of screwups/bad decisions/mis-steps on the part of 1 or more of their business units, the whole name suffers a reputation hit. I remember a time when many people I knew swore by Sony electronics - you just couldn’t go wrong. Heck, I would still consider a Sony display pretty highly but parts of the company are just not making easy for the rest of them to continue to succeed. Ah… “growth”.
Hey Alex! I’m not sure why I’m posting this here. Anyway, found this and wanted to hear your what you have to say. It’s about some contest to find a security flaw in the Mac OS. And how the author says mac users are in denial about mac’s security vulnerabilities. http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=375&tag=nl.e622