News Sony tries really hard to annoy with new DRM

[WilHarris]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/06/17/sony_new_drm/

[monkeyville]

Lemonjelly fan ehhh I'm with you on that.


As for Sony....well i stopped using and buying their minidiscs because of the farce that was sonicstage.

[DaSuperFly]

Go Lemon Jelly! When will they learn to sign up better artists instead of trying to enforce copyrights.

[TheAnimus]

Yey Lemon Jelly, their new more dancie trancie stuff came as a nice suprise
just got to wait for the album!

Sony, oh dear sony, Remeber OpenMG was code-named harmony (or symphony or something equaly stupid) because sony records make shedloads more money than sony electronics.

Its such a shame because their mobile devices (such as the HD3) is way ahead of the game (small in one dimension than an iPod Mini, 20gig, 30hour battery life) you could easily call it a good 2 years ahead of the apple ones. But the software, man its terrible, on my main developement machine, it eats a stonking 2.8gig of virtual memory when i import my entire collection :drop: Then as i keep my CDs in flacc, i had to cross convert em to PCM wav, before i could xfer them, a true over night job for 'el desktop. Silly sony.

[Da Dego]

Silly sony is right. Silly, silly, stupid sony.



Yet another stupid arse attempt to inconvenience those who legitimately bought the CD in the first place. You THINK they'd REWARD the people who actually PAID for the thing, but nooooooo...

Much better that we remind the legal people who are still dumb enough to buy the CD all about the fact that they're getting ripped off for their $20 compared to the dude next door who just burned it as many times as he wanted for free.

Ya know, DRM is getting to be its own marketing tool for piracy:
"Want content rights? Don't go waste your money on that CD, which is restricted to one use ever in this particular region-encoded serial-ID'ed player which requires your fingerprints and a pint of blood to identify you are really the owner and have paid dearly for the right to press play (but not rewind, that may allow you to listen twice!). Bit-torrent doesn't tell you where you can use your music."

I can see it now...

[Brew]

Sounds like a quiet admission that all thier bs just doesnt work.

In an age where the PSP was hacked within 1 day of release, why even try.

[Firehed]

Too true. And it's not casual piracy that would damage sales, it's the mass piracy that they're not even trying to stop. And anyways, if you can only make 3 copies, just copy the copies. Surely if you just do an audio copy rather than CD backup the copies wouldn't be protected, and if all else fails just rip to mp3 and send your friend a big email.

What a waste of time... just another way to ENCOURAGE piracy by pissing off the average consumer.

/edit - worth noting that aside from the software, minidiscs were great. A good 50 hours off a single AA battery, never skipped for me, etc. Media was relatively pricy compared to CDs, but still a good value imo. The software was so terrible though (plus a couple limitations to minidiscs, like 1700character limit total for labels, I went over that many times), it ruined any chance of sucess.

[webbyman]

Originally Posted by DaSuperFly

Go Lemon Jelly! When will they learn to sign up better artists instead of trying to enforce copyrights.

what he said^

and they are just plain wasting their time... and make me think what... 'god those people are sonys realy are d**k heads'

[blackerthanblack]

The real winners here are the team of ppl who actually get paid by Sony to come up with this stuff. Yeh I want a job with Sony then I could rip them off.

[ZERO <ibis>]

sone of these compaines will just never cach on there is no way to ever stop people from making copies of a file there or its a wast of money to try besides you can awalys use an inline audio recorder program and just record the music wile it's playing without having windows mak any noise than you could coppy the file billios of times.

so hopefully one day they will just hit a brick wall

and be like why were we wasting all that money

[dom_]

but they see any costs as small compared to the extra revenue they could get.

seems silly really as when it was tape and lp, they could do nothing. other than get shops selling copies shut down.

[TheAnimus]

i think most people are missing the scary thing, a record company makes an incredible profit compared to the electronics company which bought/set it up some 15+ years ago.

Thats scary.

[DarkLord7854]

It's kidan sad really, maybe if they lowered the prices (specialy on games) people wouldn't make so many copies or use P2P programs as much. I mean really, 15$ for a music CD, when you can buy 20 blank CDs for 5$.
It's just another failed attempt to stop CD copying...

[Dinh]

To me, looks like they are trying to make people download, instead of buying the cd. If you know what I mean.

[LAGMonkey]

In a way, they ARE trying to push everyone over to downloading the music. Think how many legit music download sites are popping up. And with all the DRM that the music you download from those sites contain (not to mention the special software that you have to use) Sony and others are seeing a gold mine!

Correct me if im wrong, but the cost of building and maintaining factories to make CDs is HUGE. If you could take out that cost and just give the music to a company who you then charge X ammount every time they sold it. Said company B worries about the bandwidth and server cost and company A (Sony etc) laughs all the way to the bank!

[Kevo]

Originally Posted by LAGMonkey

In a way, they ARE trying to push everyone over to downloading the music. Think how many legit music download sites are popping up. And with all the DRM that the music you download from those sites contain (not to mention the special software that you have to use) Sony and others are seeing a gold mine!

Correct me if im wrong, but the cost of building and maintaining factories to make CDs is HUGE. If you could take out that cost and just give the music to a company who you then charge X ammount every time they sold it. Said company B worries about the bandwidth and server cost and company A (Sony etc) laughs all the way to the bank!

Bingo!

There’s apparently been some major "upper" management reshuffles going on within Sony recently which has allowed them (Sony BMG) to see the much bigger picture going on around them.

This is also why Sony is becoming less proprietary with there hardware.

[Da Dego]

Yep. It's a wise market move, but it benefits all parties, honestly. I'll pay the $0.99/song. I won't pay $17.95 or even $14.95 for a CD. Digital downloading gives me a host of convenient ways to play my music, whereas I then have to go through an extra conversion process for a CD.

Overall, the record companies are like the Oil companies. They're fighting to keep us on the same system for as long as they can, until noone is willing to put up with it anymore. Then suddenly they'll say "Oh, look, we're now supporting this...aren't we great?" And we all say, "Oh, boy! They've listened!" when in truth they've been planning this move for 5 years (meaning they've been planning new ways to make this distribution style limited and painful just like CDs). For now, they'd like to shut down as much of the online scene as possible, but we're reaching that turning point where people will refuse to pay for the overpriced and limited CD. So we start to see the emergence of iTunes and other legit sites, and people will now pay. Just like eventually, we'll start seeing hydrogen fueling stations...and they'll all be owned by Exxon and Chevron and BP.

The **** of it is, now the artists will make less money. Because they get percentages of profits on the music as royalties. So at $0.99/song, they're getting less money so that the record company can maintain their same margins...even though the only cost-savings went to the record company (who now needs to pay nothing to distribute their music).