News Sony BMG apologise

I think the only really bad thing coming for hackers, rippers and crackers is tcpa... AgainstTCPA.com by the way.

 

yeah thats nice, they are only appologizing because they need to salvage what they can of thier image, if they didnt beleive in this practice they wouldnt have tried to force this garbage down consumers throats.

 

The whole problem with DRM is that it only effects people that have no intentions of pirating material. They say outright "this is to stop casual piracy; we know we don't stand a chance against thepiratebay". Yet it's the stuff to prevent casual piracy that pisses off the PAYING customers, driving even more to "real" piracy.

As if piss-poor content wasn't enough of a deterrent from buying it...

TCPA is a totally different thing, and utterly optional. Little do MS and the other boys know that it'll be what pushes a HUGE amount of people to open-source and give linux development (well, support moreso) a massive boost. This was taking content protection one step too far, TCPA will be the same. The one big difference being that you can choose to turn off the fritz chip (if it's enabled) in your BIOS, you'd just be unable to run TC-only software (anything from MS, for example). So if nothing else, it'll kill Office sales as you can be fairly sure OpenOffice.org (and other alternatives) won't require it. It's just another one of those "well, it sounds like it has good intentions, but if you think about it for more than five seconds, it's painstakingly clear it's the hand pushing you over so you can take it up you-know-where".

I'd imagine HDCP will have a similar backlash.

Consumers already take a ton of s*** from the companies, and many are on the edge. As long as it gets across the message of some sort of upgrade, most consumers will say "ooh goodie, that totally outweighs the manditory ranal-ape". But when I heard the term "high-definition windows" in a commercial for Windex, it's clear to me that it's nothing more than just another marketing gimmick. And yes, I've seen SD and HD content, and the only difference to me is my CPU usage and stupidly high space requirements.

Within the next five years, I'd imagine the entire outlook on computers will change drastically, just because they're pushing so much stuff to protect you from your own stupidity (and charging big bucks along the way) that consumers will finally realize enough is enough. The only computer stuff I buy is hardware upgrades and games (and I'm very picky about branding, I won't touch it if EA is even in the title). Anything else I either find a free/OS alternative, "extend" my trial period *cough* or realize it's not that important anyways.

 

Are Sony-BMG and First4Internet going to apologise for basically stealing LGPL protected source code from the LAME project?

Source

 

Sony will probably claim deniability (and get it) on this issue; due diligence on the software wouldn't have extended to examining the source unless there was a reason to. First4Internet, on the other hand, is probably going to go belly-up with all the negative publicity surrounding their disastrous programs and code theft.

 

The thing is, it's not an apoligy, its just a new direction in PR, its not about right or wrong with companies like Sony, its about money, image is worth money, this was hurting their image, and no doubt losing them a few sales too. They are not sorry, they just don't want the money to stop flowing.

 

i agree with you on everything but the SD/HD comparison bit, i have never heard anyone else say that about HD stuff
on forums or in real life, seeing as HD stuff is like hen's teeth this side of the pond most of my mates have never seen any HD content but i've shown them Black Hawk Down on dvd and in HDTV mpeg and they can clearly see the difference
i still say you're just blind

copy protection on games recently has just gotten ridiculous, i know quite a few people that have decided not to buy a game because it uses starforce 7 or one of the other uber draconian copy protection systems