MP3 Phones That Degrade MP3 Sound?

from the that's-right,-make-life-worse-for-people dept

Here's another one that I wish were an April Fool's joke, but probably isn't. The Korean recording industry is upset that some mobile phone makers were going to come out with MP3 playing mobile phones. They've convinced the companies to offer phones that purposely degrade MP3 sound quality. They claim that the point is to degrade the quality of illegally downloaded files - but what about perfectly legal MP3s? The article quotes all the usual nonsense from the recording industry about the impact an MP3 player could have on the market, and brushes over the success folks like Apple have had integrating a perfectly reasonable MP3 player with a paid download service. It also says at the end of the article: "peer-to peer file-sharing services will take away $4.7 billion in revenues from the music industry in 2008" without pointing out that such statistics are highly questionable, and there are even some studies that show file sharing actually improves sales. Yet another case where work is being done to give consumers less. At what point do companies realize just how backwards this thinking is?