Posted 11/21/2005 05:24:00 PM by Douglas

The home computer has been the thorn in the side of record company executives and the RIAA for the past decade, and after countless attempts to reign in the piracy of CD and/or file sharing, how does Sony react? Like a total moron.

The fact that so-called digital rights management might always be a doomed experiment became painfully clear with the fiasco that erupted after Sony BMG Music Entertainment added a technology known as XCP to more than 50 popular CDs.

After it was discovered that XCP opened gaping security holes in users' computers — as did the method Sony BMG offered for removing XCP — Sony BMG was forced to recall the discs this week. Some 4.7 million had been made and 2.1 million sold.

Here's the deal, guys. You sell buggy whips. Those little $13.99 to $15.99 plastic disks with holes in the middle have proved to be a complete rip-off, not only because they only contain 10 songs (when 20 will generally easily fit) but because two thirds of the CD is complete and utter dreck pumped out by the label as filler. Instead of attacking the problem, why not try something that's already 100% within your control: The cause:

Phil Leigh, analyst for Inside Digital Media, said the debacle shows just how reluctant the labels are to change their business model to reflect the distribution powers — good and bad — of the Internet. He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy.

Well, Phil, you can't unring the bell. The internet has shown us how easy it is to share files, and even without the net, it's so much easier to extract the "good" songs from a CD and dump the rest. Then it can again be "shared" many times. I think it's a stretch to say these are lost sales, because these people aren't going to buy the CD for one decent song anyway. But where did Sony go wrong this time?:

"The biggest mistake the labels are making is, they're letting their lawyers make technical decisions. Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra," Leigh said. "They insist on chasing this white whale."

When all you've got is a hammer, pretty soon, everything starts looking like a nail. If everyone in the country is guilty of violating the spirit, if not the letter of the law, then why not go after my grandma because I made her a copy of my Glen Miller CD? She's just as guilty, right? Why not throw her in jail? But he continues:

It's easy to understand why the music industry wishes songs could magically be prevented from being ripped from CDs and shared freely.

Why is that easy to understand? If I buy a CD, want to listen to it on my computer (or MP3 player) why should I have to jump through any hoops? I paid for it, right? I own that copy, and I haven't made any duplicates. Where's the crime? The record companies don't understand why their customers don't want the medium they paid for to be totally unusable in a format they desire?

The industry has seen an estimated $2 billion overall decline in CD sales in the last five years. New digital services such as Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes have made up some of that, but still account for just 6 percent of the industry's global sales.

YAWN! They're still blaming this $2 Billion decline on the internet? That was cute in 1999-2000, but now it's just trite. I know I'm not the first to say it, but listen: There is a new method of exchanging recordings. You can't stop it. Adapt or be forgotten.

This is going to be a huge leap in the interpretation of intellectual property laws in this country. For too long, these record companies have been dependent on stupid teenagers to go out and buy the first CD they saw. Now they don't have to. Hell, they could even record the song from the radio, digitize it to their computer, and put that on a CD and listen to it from now 'till the second coming. Is that illegal? I'm sure the RIAA would say yes.

This sums it up nicely, and I wish the record companies would take note:

"It's an arms race that the content owner can never win," said Yankee Group analyst Michael Goodman. "In order to make it usable, you also have to make it beatable. If you really truly want to lock it down, it is possible to lock it down. But it is so onerous on the user that they'd never want to use it in the first place."

So, why are your sales down, jackass?

Also, enjoy your lawsuit for implementing spyware, jackasses:

Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment for hiding "spyware" software on its compact discs in a bid to thwart music copying.

According to the lawsuit filed in Travis County, several of the company's music compact discs require customers to download Sony's media players if they want to listen to the CDs on a computer.

God Bless Texas!

Labels: RIAA