Sony’s latest cockup with DRM in CD’s shows that they haven’t a clue – or rather that the media bods in Sony don’t have a clue.
More than ever, Sony needs to split its hardware and media divisions before one drags the other down.
Such a spectacular failure in DRM attached to physical media sets a huge precedent – Sony will have to change tactic. Their real fight now is with Apple since Apple’s DRM is flowing onto iPods without people really noticing while their own attempt got caught by being stupidly aggressive.
Anyone who has visited a used CD store recently and looked at the prices, can see that the very CDs that the music industry fought so hard to push, with inferior artwork to vinyl, are its worst enemy – they have created the sneakernet Napster. The price of used CD’s is dropping as they change from a product of desire (the inferior artwork is not enough to collect) to one of convenience – serial numberless disk storage media.
One of the things that may happen is that Sony pretend to repent and donate money into the cash strapped EFF to force Apple to open up their own DRM or place warning notices on iTunes downloads that the songs will only ever play on Apple products.
This would be Sony’s true Trojan horse as their ultimate interests would be orthogonal to consumers.
What is happening to all media is that the distribution has changed and that we don’t need the distribution companies. From MySpace to my iPod there is no role for them, just like there is no real role for Blacksmiths when people have cars.