“It’s becoming a regular occurrence in CD shops across the country: an irate customer comes in complaining the CD they bought won’t play on their computer, and worse yet, they can’t transfer the tunes to their iPod,” Angela Pacienza reports for The Canadian Press. “The culprit is copy-protected or copy-controlled CDs – something many Canadian music retailers say they would like to see pulled from store shelves. ‘This is just another really, really ridiculous way of telling our customers, ‘We don’t want your business,” said Tim Baker of Sunrise Records, which has 31 shops in southern Ontario. ‘It’s so stupid.'”
“The issue was underscored last week with news that the anti-piracy technology used on about 50 Sony BMG titles released in the United States and 37 in Canada secretly left spyware behind on people’s computers,” Pacienza reports. “‘Consumers are not liking it,’ says Leslie Purchase, assistant manager at CD Plus in the Halifax Shopping Centre. ‘People are getting very frustrated by (copy-protected CDs).’ She’s noticed an increase in customers who put CDs down after noticing the “copy-controlled” or “copy-protected” label. ‘A lot of customers won’t buy them now. They say ‘I don’t want it’,’ she said.”
Pacienza reports, ‘It’s backwards thinking. It’s protectionism,’ said Terri McBride, president of Vancouver-based Nettwerk, whose roster includes the Be Good Tanyas. ‘The average consumer who’s not tech-savvy is going to buy the CD, thinking that they can load it onto their iPod . . . They’re going to be royally pissed off.’ He added: ‘Why do you want to piss off the people who buy?'”
Full article here.
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Very true – They really piss off the people who buy – and like owning a nice cd in full quality, with lyrics, etc (I do!)… And who might like to put their own music on their iPod.
Pirates find it easier to download off P2P anyway!
Pissing off your customers, and not the people you try to defeat sounds like bad marketing to me…
MW: complete, like “those majors are complete bozos”
They piss them off because they are too Stupid to see the whole picture. To Protect and Serve will not work in this arena. Face it record companies, your day is over.
Sony obviously didn’t invent the cluestick!
Look, anyone who wants to rip off a CD to put on the P2P network can do so–worst case, you just snag the analogue sound coming out of the CD player and re-digitize the music.
All this copy protection does is to piss off legitimate consumers who are BUYING the CDs, not the bozos who want to make illegal copies. An education campaign about not stealing music seems a much better way to spend $$ than creating these restrictive copy-protected CDs.
But I guess if Sony et al want to drive off their paying customers, well then, they’re doing a bang-up job!
Copy protecting cds now is like closing the barn door after the horse already got out.
[Terri McBride, president of Vancouver-based Nettwerk] added: “Why do you want to piss off the people who buy?”
Because you’re a bully. Hammer the weak, and defenseless. The average consumer had no idea they were being hosed by $ony.
BTW, how come all those protection racketeers like Symantec and McAfee didn’t reveal this trojan? I mean, it’s been out for over 7 long ass months! Scum.
Sony – such a hoser company.
That is: We don’t like CDs and would prefer if everyone just bought their music from iTunes.
Just a reminder to vote for steve on http://www.time.com
Once upon a time there lived an old woman who had a number of hens, ducks, and geese. She used to send her little daughter to the meadow every day to take care of the ducks and geese.
But she had one goose that she never allowed with the others. This one had a little house and yard of its own. It was such a wonderful goose that the old woman was afraid of losing it.
Each day this goose laid a large golden egg. The woman could hardly wait for the new day to come, she was so eager to get the golden egg.
At last she said to herself, “I will kill the goose and get the gold all at once.”
But when she had killed the goose she found that it was just like all the other geese.
In her haste to become rich, she had become poor.
Moral: Greed destroys the source of good.
Funny thing too, is that music sharing is legal in Canada. We pay a tax on CDs and drives for the sole purpose of allowing us to do it. So not only is DRM not required in Canada, it is preventing us from doing something legal. Talk about disrepect by a company for the sovereign laws of a country.
It’s time to shine the DVD Jon bat signal in the sky.
yeah, gotta admit, screwwing the patron who is actually plunking down $15 to purchase is kind of silly, and highly unlikely to prevent someone bent on copying the cd from finding a way to do it.
“Thanks for the $15 sucker, here’s your reward, a VIRUS.”
Thanks, I’ll not be buying from Sony.
Now the question that’s been nagging me is that if Sony is doing this with cds what have they got up their sleeve with Blu-ray dvds? One of the great attractions of the Blu-ray technology for Sony and other copyright holders is the embedded DRM. Will we have to contend with the same BS from Sony over this medium? I shudder to contemplate such a scenario.
The big media companies have to learn that copy protection just doesn’t work. Progress marches on and their struggling to try and keep the old paradigm in place will continue to be fruitless. They need to think out of the box and come up with a solution that leverages the new technology instead of fights it. So far Apple is the only company to come up with a working solution that actually thinks about what consumers want and THAT is why it is dominating in the online area.
Both Blu-ray and HD-DVD have copy protection schemes. Different versions of the same system, in fact. On consortium is lead by the “evil” Sony. The other includes the “evil” Microsoft.
Perhaps this blunder by Sony will draw some attention to the proposed protection schemes in the new DVD formats and result in pressure within the consortiums to adopt something a little more consumer friendly.
Apple can probably figure out that a lost sale means less money, but their partners might not be capable of such complex thinking.
MDN MW: perform
RoadWarrior – that’s old news. The extra tax is no longer happening in Canada and it NEVER made file sharing legal. We just didn’t have a law for it specifically. And to be doubly clear, *uploading* was always illegal.. it was the downloading that was questionable.
Regular DVD’s often force me to watch the FBI warning (disabling the menu and fast forward) and sometimes, ads. Whenever I buy a DVD that does this I feel ripped off.
And all this crap they make legitimate buyers go through doesn’t do a thing to stop the real pirates, it just annoys their customers. Clueless.
On the positive side, wasn’t Sony leading the charge to demand multi-tiered pricing of the iTMS? I figure that Sony publicly shooting itself in the foot may diminish or delegitimize their efforts or stop them entirely.
I used to boycott Copy Protected discs until I realised that my G3 iMac’s CD drive could read the discs as if they were Audio CDs. My guess is that pre-2002 CD drives do not get confused by the copy protection so if you have an old computer use that for ripping Copy Protected discs.
‘Why do you want to piss off the people who buy?'” For the record companies it is one simple word to answer this question, GREED!
I will not buy ANY CD that has protection software on it.
Even if I love the artists music – I wanna use the music how I want to and not be forced by some multi-million dollar record company which is screwing it’s artists out of royalties.
Fuck Sony, EMI etc – ‘It’s about the music guys’ – something the record companys know nothing about!
angela…i just saw you on ‘listed’ and man you are cute!