Sony's evil plan to spy on YOU!

Mood: S.A.D.D. (Mele Kalikimaka anyone?)
Listening to: howling wind

Sony Gets Caught With Slipped Discs - Newsweek

EFF: Sony-BMG Litigation

As if we needed another reason to be fearful of the Recording Industry... Sony BMG has decided that releasing sub-standard and over-hyped products at inflated prices wasn't enough to turn the consumer's stomach... The company has decided to litigate the experience of listening to music and install spyware on computers used to play CDs.

The real crime is that people are so ignorant of the practice that they probably haven't even heard about it yet. Well the class action suits to reign in Sony and it's "through the looking glass" consumer relations policies have started. You may already be an unwitting victim...

Slowly, inch by inch, the movie and music industries are redefining what ownership is. More alarmingly, they are telling us how we can listen to music and watch movies in our own homes. And we, the legal consumer, sit idly by as they tell us what DVDs we can watch, whether we can skip advertisements, if we can make a back-up copy, or play a CD or DVD on our computers!

David Cross and Bob Odenkirk lampooned the movie industry's mindset on their HBO show, Mr. Show several years ago. The skit involved "COUPON: the movie". As the entertainment execs sat around trying to figure out why no one wanted to see a movie about a coupon, they decided it was America's fault for misleading the company about their taste in movies. So they sued every American citizen in a reverse class-action suit and won. The punchline was that every American had to go see the movie by law. It was a funny premise at the time, but we are really getting close to that joke becoming the norm. I've always maintained that the receeding sales of CDs has more to do with a value/cost imbalance rather than a piracy problem. Pircay, like terrorism, has become a convenient catch-all for justifying outrageous actions. Piracy is, most likely, the least of our society's worries. DVD and CD pirates sell to buyers who could never afford or gain access to the product. Genuine consumers make up the vast majority of the ever-shrinking market.

Personally, small independent labels get most of my CD money anyway. The vague unquantifiable notion of piracy provides an explanation to angry stock-holders and CEOs without accepting the possibility of blame. They are essentially arguing that they've put together an exceptional product, marketted it perfectly and people want to have it but, they are getting it illegally instead of paying for it. So, a miserable failure of a product (and the imbeciles who produced it) get to invoke "the mysterious dude" alibi in defense of their failure in the free market. We ought to be as skeptical as Gil Grisham on CSI when offered that alibi.

Punishing the consumer is in vogue right now... caveat emptor. Buyer beware. We're paying for inept music and movie execs to leach off the work of the few genuinely talented artists out there. It inflates the cost of music and movies and infringes on the concepts of private ownership, public realm, and personal freedon. Maybe they can attach an end user agreement to our children's toys mandating in what fashion they can played with before everyone finishes with their Holiday shopping? I mean we're only licensing the idea of the toy afterall. We don't really own it or have any control over it.