Thursday, November 10, 2005

DRM and Sony (suck)

For guys who are preachers of buying only "legal" music (including me) here's an interesting story about the DRM (Digital Rights Management) gone way too far, Sony-BMG have been marketing "Digitally Protected" CDs which restrict the number of times the CD can be ripped (ability to convert into mp3s or other digital format), though the fact that a CD is digitally protected is made evident on the jewel case, what they don't tell you is that putting the CD into the drive would also install a root-kit (a special kinda malware which uses some cloaking technique to hide itself from being listed in tools like task-explorer and windows explorer), not going into the nuances of what does that mean for the end-user it basically is one of the crappiest thing that could be done to a customer (if you are really interested in the nuances, check this link).
This particular action by Sony has made me lose all respect that I once had for Sony as being the "nice" company & from now on will definitely think twice before going for a Sony product!
Also, I feel DRM in it's current form itself has lot to improve on, if I am paying for some music I should be able to play it on all the devices that I have including my CD Player, computer(s), pocket pc, portable player and whereever else I want to play it as long as I am not illegally distributing it to others. Think about it this way the guys who use P2P clients to download music don't have any restrictions on copying the files around and generally get a much better bitrate (read audio quality) whereas people who use iTunes or any other DRM protected website to download music legally or pay for these new "Digitally-protected" CDs end up having to deal with all these restrictions. So to me it looks like the RIAA itself wants the music lover to use the P2P clients and other pirated way of getting music rather than going the legal channel and having malware installed on the system which can't even be removed!

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