Can Any Business Model Based On Copy Protection Survive?

from the just-wondering dept

Shawn Fanning's Snocap gets an awful lot of attention, mainly because of Shawn Fanning's association with the company -- but very little of it seems to think critically through the issues the company faces. The latest piece, in the NY Times, is no exception. It's a standard profile of Snocap, barely worth mentioning at all -- except for one thing: the still ongoing Sony BMG rootkit fiasco. It's not clear if the Snocap profile was written before all of this happened, but it doesn't once mention the issue -- which is unfortunate. It seems that the rootkit issue has brought plenty of negative attention on the fact that copy protection treats users like criminals, while making their computers less secure. It would seem like a basic question concerning Snocap is how trusting people will be to some new form of copy protection -- especially one that's heavily backed by Sony BMG (as the article points out). Snocap tries to do a lot, but all it's really doing is limiting what people could do before via file sharing by slapping some extra copy protection on files. People might have been fine with that a month ago -- but it seems that people are recognizing copy protection has a lot of downsides as well.