Sony Chief Admits DRM Held Up Innovation
from the oh,-they-just-realized? dept
Derek Kerton writes "In an unusual, yet surprisingly refreshing move, Ken Kutaragi, President of Sony Computer Entertainment, admitted that Sony made strategic misjudgments when it let its Media division's DRM zealousness reduce innovation and product flexibility in its consumer electronics divisions. Sony owns Sony Pictures and Entertainment, which contains the former Columbia media house. In this case, Kutaragi was referring to Sony's use of a proprietary music format with strong DRM called Atrac, which is the only format their mobile players can read, eschewing the wildly popular but less secure MP3 format. Kutaragi said that the spirit of innovation had been "diluted" by the other divisions in the company. Now that's refreshing. Give the consumer what they want instead of what your sister division wants. Did Sony really think they could drive the world to Atrac? Is that because they've had so much success with Memory Stick or Betamax? When is Sony going to stop trying to push their proprietary formats on the world, whether DRM or other? "Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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MP3s can be encrypted.
A true secure and popular format would enable consumers the flexibility they need with the media, without the fear of piracy.
Lately, digital fingerprinting is being on it's infancy stage, and hopefully, in the near future, it will encorporate "fingerprinting" in the music devices and fingerprint-as-you-buy devices which would be invisible to the consumer, yet does not allow consumers to copy files on a device if the watermark on the media does not match the fingerprint on the MP3 player.
And, unlike previous DRM schemes, this DRM scheme will encrypt ANY type of file, including MP3s, WAVs, and others. If it is a digital file, it CAN be encrypted, no matter what format the file is in. Also, this DRM is flexive, so if you convert this file, it will still be wrapped in this DRM scheme, unlike other DRM scheme that cracks when you convert.
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Re: MP3s can be encrypted.
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Stop using
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