Sony and parent company BMG have had a rude awakening over the past couple of weeks. Sony has been trying to deal with the negative consequences of badly-implemented DRM software on 50 CD titles released this fall. The uproar has been justified. It's one thing to protect your copyrighted content from unauthorized copying and file sharing. It's another thing altogether to place invisible (rootkit) software on a CD that will be inserted into peoples' computers, making those computers vulnerable to viruses and hackers. In fact, spyware is now against the law. Both the State of Texas, of "don't mess with Texas" fame, and a California-based digital rights group have filed lawsuits against Sony BMG, citing their states’ respective anti-spyware laws. If found guilty, the penalties levied in the Texas lawsuit alone can be as high as $100,000 per affected user.
There are certainly better ways to protect digital works under copyright than to use these kinds of customer-unfriendly, invasive and rude tactics. We favor the Apple iTunes $.99 rights-protected business model, as well as the more lenient Allofmp3.com model that lets you purchase and use personal copies of music tracks more flexibly. That's because Allofmp3 falls under the jurisdiction of Russian copyright laws, not U.S. ones.
The good news is that the backlash against Sony's rude DRM practice happened quickly and loudly. No other music publishers are likely to make the same mistake. The publishing industry is learning and watching from the music industry.
The general consensus is that what happened to music—the cannibalization of music by overzealous consumers—won't have the same devastating impact on the print/publishing world. Print publishers are now moving quickly (for them) to get with the program. Here's what we see in terms of the evolution of the pay-per-use models. There's still work to be done on non-intrusive digital rights management.
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