Sony drops DRM
Song has joined the other three major music companies in making their songs available for sale without Digital Rights Management software which has stopped users being able to do things such as copy it from one device to another.
This is a huge change of tune for the big music companies. They have spent years trying to lock their music up, but have now realised that it just hasn’t worked and in fact encouraged people to illegally download music, as that is the only way to get it DRM free.
The irony in NZ is Parliament is poised to pass a new law, which will give special protection to DRM. Both the Government, and National, need to seriously consider the merits of continuing with a law which will be out of date before it is even passed. I’m not saying the Copyright Amendment Act should be thrown out because much of it is needed. But the changes over the last year would be worth considering before they pass it. At present it is halfway through the second reading, so can be amended at the Committee of the Whole stage.
January 8th, 2008 at 10:09 am
DRM has been in deep trouble for a long time.
GOOD RIDDANCE!!
January 8th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Doesn’t matter what the ‘big 4′ do now, they have cooked their own goose with fans and muso’s alike.
After Sony’s rootkit debacle a couple of years ago I will never buy another Sony product as long as I live. Whenever anyone talks to me about buying tech ie tv’s, cameras etc, I explain what Sony did in the US and try to dissuade them from buying anything with that brandname.
Punishing all your customers for the actions of a few is not a good move. If these big co’s had put as much energy into changing their business models years ago as they did to trying to fu*k over their customer base things could be different.
As it is they missed the boat and now have a serious credibility problem.
Of course Vista has a lot of this stuff bundled with it too.
Some people have written some fairly scathing thoughts on that.
January 8th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I blogged on this a few days ago:
http://multipledispatch.blogspot.com/2008/01/jobs-wins-at-drm.html
Nice typo, btw. And a surprisingly hard to spot one, hence cheap Chinese factories making things such as “Song Wallman”
January 9th, 2008 at 7:57 am
Of course they have only made it available via shops which would seem to defeat half the purpose…