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Tuesday, 3 December 2002

Fool.com: Sony's Death Grip

When an investment site picks up on how bad DRM is for business, things are looking up:
Sony Music Entertainment [announced] the advent of its new "Label Gate" digital rights management (DRM) package. Beginning in 2003, all CDs released from Sony Japan will carry this protection.

Label Gate is a one-two punch: Every track on a protected CD will be encoded, and the customer must use Sony's proprietary software to play back the tracks on a computer. This prevents people from converting the music tracks ("ripping") into other formats, such as MP3 or WAV, and sharing them over the Internet. Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong. Not for consumers, and, ultimately, not for Sony.
[...]
Unfortunately, this sort of action on Sony's part only hurts consumers --those that legitimately buy their products -- by making listening to music a hassle. Further, it violates the doctrine of Fair Use -- the ability to use a product you have legally purchased in any legal way you see fit. Sony has effectively made it impossible for a user with a couple of computers and an MP3 player to make copies of songs he has legitimately purchased. Further, DRM software actually encourages people to search for "unrestricted" copies of tracks online, through peer-to-peer networks. Unrestricted tracks would allow you to listen to the songs wherever and whenever you please.

If the record companies want to compete with peer-to-peer networks, they're going to have to find a way to give customers fast, inexpensive access to music. Restricting access and hassling customers is bad business, no matter how you look at it.
Posted by Kevin Marks at 02:10

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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