Ryan's Journal

I can't stand Reuters and CNN when it comes to technical news. I thought they were supposed to be as unbiased as possible when it came to reporting, but sometimes it seems like our capitalist society's corporations are working together with the media to make us think the way they do. I guess the conglomeration trend a la AOL Time Warner is one obvious indicator of where things are headed.

Their latest article about Sony's foolish copy protection (original link broken; see USA Today for a similar report) details how easy it is to break the scheme by drawing on the outer ring of a copy-protected disc with a marker, eliminating the first track of junk data through which Sony has destroyed Mac drives and barred PC's from playing the music. The whole bent of the article is about how evil people - especially Germans, apparently - steal Sony and Vivendi Universal's content by ripping and distributing the music across the net.

And yet they fail to realize that copy protection is a failed enterprise from the outset. If the world's evil rippers can't get 256kbps MP3 rips, then what's to stop them from directing the digital output of their normal CD players into their computers? If they can't rip a DVD straight from a computer drive (defeating the vastly idiotic and weak CSS the MPAA attempted to use), what's to stop them from making a copy with an old fashioned camcorder? Are our corporations going to start banning felt tip markers, as the article quotes one pundit, and wage a lost battle against their very own consumers? In their schemes to protect their content, they've taken a wrong turn by trying to dictate who gets to see it and who doesn't, creating their own inner cabal of hardware and content providers, attempting to force consumers into one mold.

I wish they would listen up for once. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Change your business model and adapt. Stop terrorizing your customers. Stop buying off news services to report about the horrible pirates and your poor, weakened billion-dollar-value corporations. Get a clue.

For my own par, I'm against breaking the law. I rip my own CDs (and don't distribute them) so I don't have to bother carting the collection around with me. But as Sony et al. begin to tighten their collective fists about their content, I'm beginning to rethink my position to maybe join freenet and to think it's time for the average consumer to get informed and get active. Consumer technology and law are going to make for a very interesting and societally relevant pair in the coming years. We should be informed. We should be heard. We should effect change. I should study for my final and stop ranting.

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