Blog Relations

The Boycott Sony Blog has reason for good cheer. Sony is recalling its CDs that use an insidious copyright protection, that acts something like a virus, and can blow a hole in your computer’s security.

In another area, portable, audio, I have felt for sometime now that Sony’s obsession with copyright has blown a huge hole in its profits and allowed Apple to become the big name in this very important and lucrative field. Obsessive protection of rights goes against the spirit of the internet in the post-Napster, blog-empowered era of the consumer. Blogs, file-sharing, and other developments have diluted some of the big corporations’ power and given it back to the consumer. As a result, Sony has missed the whole boat when it comes to the new wave of portable audio, MP3 players, and podcasting.

Sony of course was synonymous with portable music back in my youth. It invented the Walkman “She shall have music wherever she goes” and sold tones of tape cassettes. The music companies hated Sony because records were transfered onto cassettes and swapped at school. Sony didn’t give a fig, until, that is, it became a music business. That gave it a whole new internal conflict to deal with. How can you own loads of rights to music, and at the same time put out a product that encourages it to be copied for free?

Now Sony is advertising its new MP3 Walkman like crazy, but it’s too late. Apple and its iPods own that space.

I know about all this first hand because I’ve been a long-time user of Sony Minidiscs for recording audio, since about the mid 1990s. The minidisc player/recorder should have been the new Walkman. In fact, it’s branded as a “Walkman”. It is a great format. Simply fantastic. The compression and audio quality are better than Mp3. In the latest version, you can hold one whole gig of files on one disc costing £4. You need never run out of storage space, you just buy a new disc. You can hold your whole music collection on minidiscs. You can even use it to back up data files like Word or Excel. Most important for me, you can plug a high quality microphone into it and turn yourself into a portable radio studio.

They are better than iPods in many respects, AND they’ve been around for years longer. So why have they not been a success? The answer, in short, is because their copyright protection STINKS! In this respect they are lousy, anti-consumer, arrogant, from a business point of view, plain dumb.

Until this year, I could not even upload my own recordings made with my own microphone onto the computer. I had to play it in via a cable in real time. There was not technical reason why I couldn’t do this. The reason was that Sony was terrified that I would copy their precious pop-stars and abuse their copyright. So they even wrapped copyright protection around my own recordings.

Now, with the latest minidisc series, I am, at least, allowed to upload my microphone recordings via USB. This is a great time-saver. But I’m mighty pissed off about having to fork out another 150 quid to buy a new recorder.

I doubt very much that Sony has stopped one teenager copying one single pop-song. Teenagers are smarter than Sony. They buy other portable mp3 players.

So I still use my Sony Minidisc because its a good recorder. But many other are turning to i-River which is quickly becoming the podcaster’s best friend. And as for iPod. Well, I BET Sony wishes it was the leader in the field. It could have been.

But over all, I see this has a happy story. The new consumer era, exemplified by consumer-blog-writers, punishes arrogant corporations and rewards those who make the world a better place.