A long winded anti-DRM piece

[CityK]

When Sony brought out the VCR, it made a record player that could play Hollywood's records, even if Hollywood didn't like the idea. The industries that grew up on the back of the VCR -- movie rentals, home taping, camcorders, even Bar Mitzvah videographers -- made billions for Sony and its cohort.

That was good business -- even if Sony lost the Betamax-VHS format wars, the money on the world-with-VCRs table was enough to make up for it.

But then Sony acquired a relatively tiny entertainment company and it started to massively screw up. When MP3 rolled around and Sony's walkman customers were clamoring for a solid-state MP3 player, Sony let its music business-unit run its show: instead of making a high-capacity MP3 walkman, Sony shipped its Music Clips, low-capacity devices that played brain-damaged DRM formats like Real and OpenAG. They spent good money engineering "features" into these devices that kept their customers from freely moving their music back and forth between their devices. Customers stayed away in droves.

Today, Sony is dead in the water when it comes to walkmen. The market leaders are poky Singaporean outfits like Creative Labs -- the kind of company that Sony used to crush like a bug, back before it got borged by its entertainment unit -- and PC companies like Apple.

That's because Sony shipped a product that there was no market demand for. No Sony customer woke up one morning and said, "Damn, I wish Sony would devote some expensive engineering effort in order that I may do less with my music." Presented with an alternative, Sony's customers enthusiastically jumped ship.

Link

 

[paugie]

I enjoyed reading this piece. I'm in the Philippines. I don't Kazaa, P2P but I tend to agree with the opinion of the speaker.
What do people in the west usually think on this? I'm curious

 

[e_dawg]

I think any computer savvy person -- judging from most of my techie friends anyways -- hates the restrictions DRM, SCMS, and DMCA crap put on music files. I was waiting for a legit way to add to my music collection for the past few years now. I have absolutely no problem with paying for my music. But to have every single online store distribute music in low bitrate WMA or other such DRM-ridden proprietary formats that must be played on WMP9 or the music store's proprietary media player with poor sound quality and with none of Winamp's DSP/in/out plug-in features makes the listening experience so dreadful that I refuse to buy my music online. To hell with buying music legally. I'm sticking with P2P until somebody will sell me mp3 or ogg files that I can play wherever and with whatever player I choose.

 

[Mercutio]

So you're going to grow old and die with WinAmp, then.

And of course, I envision a future where I can't get my music at all.

 

[blakerwry]

i really liked this piece. I was under the impression that iTunes had come up with a workable DRM strategy, but I guess I was mistaken.

At the moment I am boycotting DRM with regards to music. I no longer purchase music from BMG because of their anti-copying DRM protection that they have included in many of their releases. I am hesitant to go any further into DRM than I have to.


I also agree that there is a lot of money to be made if someone can come up with a player to play all formats. I think the new anti-piracy laws are hurting consumers a lot. 1st by restricting them and 2nd by slowing innovation.

 

[Pradeep]

No DRM was one of the reasons I got my iRiver ihp-120. No copy protection bullshit. Drag and drop files/music from WindowsExplorer. Now of course it won't playback files that use DRM, but then again I wouldn't buy lo-rez crap like that anyway. I buy the CD.

There is also the issue of wider use of encryption/protection on consumer electronics, such as DVI-HDCP and HDMI. However I'm not really concerned in those instances because after all, WTF do you do with a 5 gbit/sec datastream, even if you broke the encryption? Tho I'm sure that HD-DVD will have a far more robust encryption scheme than the joke that is CSS.