For all their weeping and wailing about peer-to-peer piracy, sometimes it seems like the music industry giants are trying to discourage us from buying their CDs. That's certainly the impression readers are getting from dealing with the copy protection scheme being used on recent Sony BMG Music releases.
"My family presented me with a concert DVD/CD set of Dido Live for Father's Day," one reader wrote recently. "The CD, unfortunately, has some sort of copy protection that keeps me from playing it. Not copying, ripping, or ripping it off, mind you -- it's impossible to get it to play."
The reader met all the system requirements including the latest version of Windows Media Player, but he continued to get a "MediaMax error" code whenever he tried to play the CD. "Fortunately, the copy protection vendor -- SunnComm -- has technical support, or at least the appearance of it," the reader wrote. "But beyond an automated we-got-your-message message, I've gotten no reply from SunnComm in the 10 days since. No problem, because there's a help address on Arista, the label's website. Just click on this link and ... failure notice ... the message bounced. The BMG corporate office phone number routed me to an endless cycle of voice jail. The store that sold it won't accept opened items for return, and I'm feeling well and completely screwed. Now that the entertainment media conglomerates have co-opted our legal system, I expect we can look forward to a lot more of the same."
Luckily for the reader, there are a number of easy ways to get around the SunnComm DRM, including just holding down the shift key when booting the CD. And he's perfectly within his rights to do so, even under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, because he made a serious effort to get assistance from the copyright holder before circumventing the malfunctioning copy protection. But rather than getting around the DRM, many readers would prefer returning a CD that was sold to them under false pretenses.
"I recently purchased a new CD -- Foo Fighters: In Your Honor -- at a local Best Buy," wrote another reader. "When I got home I opened it up to play the CD in my computer, I was greeted with licensing agreement to play this CD! I had never experienced this before. After perusing this 'license' I was appalled and did not agree to these terms. I want to be able to make a backup of the CD, and I want to be able to download the music to my iPod, which it says I can't do."
The EULA that came with the reader's Foo Fighters CD states that customers may only use the digital content on players and portable devices that are "compatible with the technology used to deliver to deliver and secure the Digital Content ... (and) Compliant with BMG's Digital Content security requirements." The reader saw on the SunnComm support website that the iPod is definitely not compatible or compliant with the MediaMax DRM software (SunnComm and Sony blame this on Apple), even though again there are workarounds that make it physically possible to do so. In effect, if you move the Foo Fighters tunes from the CD to your iPod, you are committing the almost capital offense of violating the Sony BMG licensing agreement.
"When I chose not to agree to the license, the CD automatically ejected so I could not play it," the reader wrote. "To add insult to injury, it still installs a driver on my computer even after I've declined the terms. So with the CD useless, I took it back to Best Buy for a refund. Even though I told them that I hadn't agreed to the license -- which can only be viewed by opening the CD -- they refused to take it back since it had been opened. When I asked to speak to a manager, it only got worse. 'We already have your money -- I don't care what you do,' he told me. Simply amazing. At this point I have no sympathy whatsoever for the music industry or the retail outlets who cry about consumer piracy. If they don't really care about the consumer, why should we care about them?"
A reader who is a fan of Velvet Revolver found another interesting bit of information while studying the SunnComm site. "I'd heard you were better off buying the songs you want from iTunes instead of getting the CD," the reader wrote. "Unless you use a Mac, it's a real pain to move the CD to your iPod. But there was also a FAQtoid there about not being able to use Sony Minidisk players. I've got one of those buried somewhere in my closet. I bought an iPod instead because Sony's DRM made its player completely useless. So it's a tad ironic for me to see that now Sony is publishing albums with DRM that's incompatible with the DRM on their hardware."
It's hard to understand what kind of value proposition Sony thinks it's offering its customers here. Like most copy protection, the SunnComm technology Sony is using does nothing to stop the pirates -- it only inconveniences the honest customers. And while Sony appears to be the most aggressive in loading up its disks with kludgy DRM and bizarre licensing restrictions, there's every sign the rest of the music industry -- and the motion picture industry as well -- are moving in the same direction.
As dumb as it may seem, their message to customers is clear. Please refrain from downloading their content from dubious online Internet sources, they say -- go buy their CDs and DVDs from the outlets they prefer. And the incentive they're offering is DRM that won't stop the piracy they decry but may very well prevent you from making fair use of the product you purchased. Gee, how can we pass up a deal like that?
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