Sony’s misguided digitial rights management (DRM) solution — discussed at length in Backspin (see last week’s column “Is Sony’s CD DRM malware?” and this week’s “More on Sony’s rootkit“) is definitely not acceptable to consumers — at least to those who took part in a recent on-line poll by the antivirus firm Sophos.
The poll of more than 1,500 business PC users revealed that 98% of respondents believed Sony’s DRM software is a security threat while a meger 2% thought that it was an acceptable technique to fight piracy (I would love to speak with some of these people — I can’t imagine how they could think such a thing).
On a side note, Sophos has made a utility available for free that detects the Sony BMG DRM, disables its “cloaking” function and prevents that functionality from re-installing. The utility also detects the versions of the Stinx Trojan that exploit the vulnerability in the Sony BMG DRM that allows the Trojan to be masked by the DRM system.
What Sony and apparently every other content owner still doesn’t get is, as I discussed in a previous Backspin (“Why DRM will never work” written way back in October 2002), that the genie is out of the bottle. The genie, the bits that carry content, are infinitely replicable for more-or-less zero cost which makes the bits uncontrollable while the bottle, the physical media that they are distributed on (CDs, DVs, and networks) are effectively irrelevant.
For Sony — or anyone else for that matter — to attempt to corral the bits on a CD or DVD is simply ridiculous given today’s technology and culture and even more so because physical non-network media will become effectively obselete for entertainment content within five years at most.
What Sony and apparently every other content owner still doesn’t get is, as I discussed in a previous Backspin (“” written way back in October 2002), that the genie is out of the bottle. The genie, the bits that carry content, are infinitely replicable for more-or-less zero cost which makes the bits uncontrollable while the bottle, the physical media that they are distributed on (CDs, DVs, and networks) are effectively irrelevant.For Sony — or anyone else for that matter — to attempt to corral the bits on a CD or DVD is simply ridiculous given today’s technology and culture and even more so because physical non-network media will become effectively obselete for entertainment content within five years at most.
