DRM a big mistake, admits Sony boss
p2pnet news view | DRM:- Sony boss Howard Stringer, who’s never been able to live down the rootkit spyware scandal, has admitted DRM was a big mistake.
“We can no longer say that we’re right and our customers are wrong”, he’s confessed.
But this wasn’t an attempt by one of the members of the Big 4 organised music gang, the others being Vivendi Universal, EMI and Warner Music, to sort things out: to admit it’s time to start treating those you depend to keep your business afloat as honest and reasonable people to be wooed, instead of thieves and criminals to be sue.
The entire concept of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) consumer control is, after all, built on a fallacy — that it’s within the realms of possibility to develop a technology able to prevent people from using one means or another to copy something they can see and/or hear.
Coupled with that is the other fallacy — that Copyright is a right.
But there’s no sign of repentance from Stringer.
Rather, it’s all Apple’s fault, he says.
“Sony would have beaten Apple in the race for digital music customers had the Japanese firm made its technology more open, according to Sony CEO Sir Howard Stringer,” says Strategy Eye.
Sony, “lost out because it relied on restrictive digital rights management (DRM) at a time when consumers were demanding access to music from different sources,” says the story, going on:
“In an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia, Stringer blames DRM for the failure of Sony’s CONNECT music download service. The system meant that only sites that signed contracts with Sony could offer music to CONNECT customers.”
If the company had, “gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple,” Musically has Stringer saying, adding:
“We can’t only build what we want to build.”
Stay tuned.
Strategy Eye – Sony chief blames DRM for defeat by Apple, May 12, 2009
Musically – Sony boss admits mistakes on copy protection, May 12, 2009
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May 14th, 2009 at 9:09 am
So, in short, he’s still twisted. But at least he’s less twisted then the rest of them.
This isn’t much of a change of heart now, is it? He somehow thinks that openness of technology would have made DRM more effective, if I’m reading this right. But that sounds more like he’s talking out of his ass, as we have come to expect from suits, than like he has anything meaningful to say.
I’ll believe a turnaround about DRM when I see it. This is Sony, after all, and there’s not much historical reason to believe they’ll stop using DRM even though they now claim it was a failure.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:48 am
“So, in short, he’s still twisted. But at least he’s less twisted then the rest of them.”
Not really. They can say one thing and do another.
After all, these liars “promised” not to file new cases in their ’sue em all’ campaign, but the campaign is still continuing.
May 14th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Sony reports $1B annual loss, first in 14 years
The Japanese electronics and entertainment company said Thursday it lost 165 billion yen ($1.72 billion) in the January-March quarter, compared to a 29 billion yen profit for the same period the previous year. That brought its full fiscal year loss to a 98.9 billion yen ($1 billion).
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/14/financial/f000413D33.DTL&feed=rss.business
May 14th, 2009 at 7:54 pm
May he just rot in hell?
May 14th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Is it just me, or is the whole “open technology would make DRM more effective” completely counterintuitive and dumb?
If it’s an “open-standard”, then figuring out how it works — the methods it uses to restrict uses — would be easier, too.
And thus, DEFEATING it would be easier, as well.
The other really fascinating thing is hearing a corporate weasel ADMITTING that “market competition” and attempts at vendor lock-in are opposites. Wow, who’d a thunk it.