New Sony Digital Camera Installs Rootkit to Stop Photo Sharing

Many consumers are complaining about Sony’s new Cybershot DSCP515 camera that installs digital rights management (DRM) software on the person’s computer so they are unable to share their digital pictures with anyone.
The DRM is similar to the one which Sony recently came under fire for on its music CDs. That software installed rootkits on consumer’s computers making them vulnerable to cyberattacks.

“Picture sharing flies under the radar when it comes to piracy,” said Wilkerson. “People know about the dangers of music and movie piracy, but not about the dangers of sharing personal photos. What happens if a person takes a picture of Mariah Carey’s latest CD? Think of the children.”

The system which also makes it difficult to print out pictures has prompted complaints from consumers. “I tried to send a picture of my daughter to her Uncle Tim, but this window popped up saying it was blocked. I decided to print it out and mail it to him. There was a 14-page license agreement that printed out first that I had to fill out and fax to Sony so they could send me an authorization code to print out the picture.”

Make your own music, buy independent, listen to INTERNATIONAL MUSIC.

Just don’t bother yourself with worthless RIAA crap!

Agreed that if prices were in the 20-25 cents per track (for popular music), the tracks would be competitive. However to drop prices to this level some fat must be eliminated from the cost structure.

However the cost structure and the cost per track will be different depending on many variables, lentgh of track, how many musicians were required, if the work is public domain or not and, country of origin, of course the quality of the performance. Put differently, some recordings have higher value than others. A Frank Sinatra recording has more value that the first recording of the kid down the street who sings off key.

What is important is that in the future whoever wants to sell music must drop the price and/or increase value, to the levels that it will be possible to compete with the “free” but not actually free and actually ideal products.

Nevertheless to achieve the best cost structure and the highest value the following are suggestions:

Eliminate somemiddlemen (the greedy bastards):
a. Music publishers. Now they are paid about 8 cents per track of CDs. Allegedly one half of that goes to the songwriters. The truth is that far less than one half goes to the songwriter. After the music publishers are eliminated, then a payment of four cents directly to the songwriter would be reasonable.

b. Record companies. These no longer make any sense for digital distribution though downloading or copying at music stores.

Enforce payments:
Additionally payments to artists and songwriters must be enforced. That will allow for lower costs, just like the utilities can charge lower costs to the paying customers if theft of the service is not allowed. Right now (at least in the USA) payment to artists is erratic and frequently non existent to say the least. I speak from very personal experience. Currentl there are about 75 records in the market with songs my family owns and not a single one of these records, produced by about 20 labels (including 16 records by Sony) has produced a payment of one single cent to my family.

Then some new methods have to be developed and used. Here are some ideas:
- Artists should sell track at their concerts, to customers that take USB flash drives to the concert.
- Music stores should sell tracks to customer’s USB drives or through email after payment is made at the store.
- Music stores should burn CDs for their customers. Here is the idea: People will be willing to pay a higher price for a group of 15 selected tracks than 15 tracks from a single musical release by one performer, where maybe one or two tracks are liked and the rest are just fillers.
- Include with the track files, files containing images, information and song scores.

One thing we must do is not fall for the employment arguments that RIAA and publishers makes… that if they disapear, so many thousand persons will be unemployed. A faulty logic, since the money not wasted by the consumers will be spent somehow anyway, in better things, thereby creating more employemnt in other sectors of the economy.

Rafael Venegas
http://www.gvenegas.com