sony copy protection

posted to me this evening not sure of the source :)



WATCHING the music and film industries get into a muddle over new technology can be a lot more fun than the entertainment they are selling.

Sony recently released a CD of "music from and inspired by" sister company Columbia's Spider-Man movie. The CD carries the now familiar warning that it "will not play on PC/Mac" because it is copy-protected using Sony's Key2audio system.

But as a promotion for the film, the CD also promises that "with your copy of the Spider-Man CD and a connection to the Internet you will have access to exclusive behind-the-scenes video footage, music videos and more". The instructions are: "1. Place the Spider-Man CD in your computer's CD-ROM drive. 2. Log on to www.columbiarecords.com/spider-man 3. Click on Get Connected."

Intrigued by the idea of a CD that is intended to work on a computer while simultaneously being designed not to work on a computer, we ran some tests. We found that the CD's music not only played perfectly well on a Windows PC, it also copied perfectly to a blank CD and happily ripped to a computer hard disc.

We then tried to follow Sony's instructions for getting connected. After a while, up came the hopeful invitation to "Insert" the CD and press "Start". But all this brought was the error message "we were unable to find Spider-Man".

So Spider-Man's copy-protection does not stop people copying but it does prevent them from accessing Sony's promotion for the movie. Cool.

lol... ah corporate buffoonery at its finest.. nice

Do you think someone ought to threaten to sue them? on the lines of

"dear Sony,

It is my intendtion to sue you for the mental stress caused by your marking your spiderman cd as unsuitable for a pc them including pc content on the disc, i now suffer from migranes as a result of all the scratching of my head i did trying to figure out what you meant, i also am currently suffering from broken knuckles caused by punching my computer monitor when the pc section of your cd failed to work as promised, i will therefore be taking action in the courts not only to recover the damages to my computer caused directly by yourselves but also for all my current and ongoing medical bills together with any legal fees, in addition i will be seeking damages to cover the cost of my computers down time (3 games, 2 movies and a few mp3 albums a day that will now have to be purchased at retail;)) and i will be applying for punative damages to prevent you from doing a similar thing to anyone else in the future

Yours

An American"

wonder if it would work?

worth a try

Of course it would work, it's America, you can sue for less.

Not exactly a story of suing... but listen to this.

A local dude is freaky about religion, started an upstart radio station won't buy the license and is pissing off the FCC, hates police, started a church and put a shooting range behind the church.

Now he was doing 50 mph in a 35 mph zone, on a fairly used street, where the local university is located and further down a prep middle school, elementry and pre k are located (I am alumni ;)).

He got caught and was fined, now here's the gag, the guy files that the radar was not maintained, as in the owner manual it states to get it checked every few months, but state and local laws does not need this requirement.

The moron got away with it. Yes, that is America at it's finest.