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Any content provider would wish to avoid having its content copied as it loses out financially and Sony happens to be in an odd position as it is a hardware manufacturer (music playback, TVs and mobile phones), a music publisher, a film studio and a games publisher. This gives it a particularly strong interest in locking down DRM, hence its obsession with the ATRAC format for Minidisc and various forms of the proprietary Memory Stick. For a long time, it had no truck with MP3 files or SD cards and does whatever it can to plough its own furrow, but Sony is able to do this as it can just about provide enough hardware, software and content to keep its customers happy.

Sony knows better than anyone about the ins and outs of copyright. After all it was sued and cleared over its invention of Betamax in 1984 when the US Supreme Court found that its VCR was capable of “substantial non-infringing uses” even though 90 percent of VCR use at the time infringed copyrights.

It’s no surprise that Sony’s knee-jerk reaction is to prevent the copying of its content but once again I ask ‘what is it trying to achieve?’ I bought a handful of CDs from Play some months back and found that two of them were Content Protected and wouldn’t play on my Hi-Fi. At the time I had a Denon CD player that also had a CD record function. The CDs were detecting this and refused to play without installing the DRM software which naturally wouldn’t work on my Hi-Fi. I had no problem ripping them to MP3 on my PC and burning audio CD copies which rather suggests that the logic is flawed. I never play CDs on my PC as I hate the spinny buzzy discs rattling away in the drive. Instead I rip all my music to MP3 and listen to my music digitally while I work. Surely Sony and everyone else must acknowledge that iTunes has proved beyond doubt that the base unit for music is now the individual song rather than the album, so many of us have little interest in playing original CDs. Instead we want to listen to songs and to create compilations. The feeble copy protection that it is using doesn’t work but instead is just annoying. More than that, if you find your CD tries to prevent you consuming music in the way that you want you can doubtless find it on Bit Torrent in a matter of minutes and once you’ve done that a few times you won’t bother buying a CD in the first place.

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