Sony's shenanigans are the latest in big companies making life difficult for the average consumer. Again, they want to control how you use your property. I can't emphasize enough how dangerous this kind of action is. It's the government's responsibility to define the limits of your freedoms, and then enforce those limits by keeping you from violating the rights of others and keeping others from violating your rights. When a corporation decides to usurp that authority, we should be up in arms. They should be penalized thoroughly. And yet what has happened? In some tech magazines and on tech forums on the internet the informed rail against this usurpation while most of America remains unaware. This is because those of us in the know don't have the billions of dollars backing us up that Sony and the like does.
Fortunately, in this case public awareness was high enough and the outrage strong enough to force Sony to back down. Alright people, that's a start in reversing the trend. Don't take a rest though, because there's plenty more where that came from.
“We deeply regret any possible inconvenience this may cause,” Sony BMG said, adding that it stood by its content-protection technology as “an important tool to protect our intellectual property rights and those of our artists“.
They're not done yet.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
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Okay, so let me get this straight. These guys want you to stop illegally downloading music. To do so, they threaten the downloaders with lawsuits. In return for being a law-abiding citizen who purchases music the old-fashioned way, on a CD from a music store, you get surreptitious software that threatens the integrity of your computer, and opens it to attacks by hackers. Those are the side-effects; the stated intention is to prevent you from digitally copying the music with ease, or using it on the most popular mp3 player in the world, the iPod.
Yep. I think they've got it figured out.
I think this fiasco most clearly deomonstrates the priniciple I've been trying to inform everyone I know about for a long time now, which is that the real motivation these recording companies have is that they want complete and total market control, which they can only achieve by controlling the ways in which you can use the product.
You know, I had about sworn off downloading any more music from iTunes, given how they restrict how many computers you can play it on, or what you can do with it after you burn it to a CD. I detest such restrictions on my music, and had made up my mind to go back to buying my music on CD where there are no restrictions...but now there's this. Compared to Sony, iTunes' approach is enlightened and understanding. I will probably still choose to purchase music on CDs that have no content restrictions, but my options may become limited. And such acts only encourage me to pirate music that comes to me free, with no restrictions on how I can use it. What's the sense in that?
I read about that just yesterday in fact. However, will the quality of the song degrade appreciably as I transfer it over?
That just depends on how high a degree of compression you desire. You don't have to have crappy quality unless you want really small files.
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