SONY's bad PR

The latest edition of Stars and Stripes carries an article concerning SONY’s nasty practice of requiring a download of SONY’s CD player, which also includes anti-piracy software, on your computer when you want to play one of the new SONY CDs. It’s buggy software that provides a back door for hackers to break into a computer and it’s software that can’t be deleted from a computer without damaging the operating system. And that, of course, isn’t something that warms the cockles of the DoD’s heart. So military personnel aren’t allowed to download the SONY player software on the military’s computers. The software download is blocked as soon as the CD is popped into the disk drive.

As a result, The Army and Air Force Exchange Service, which runs the Power Zone stores (and others), have offered to refund the purchase price of the CDs, whether they are opened or unopened, to military personnel.

I’m sure this is not a happy public relations moment for SONY, but they deserve every uncomfortable second of it.

This sort of idiocy is the primary reason why the lad and I no longer buy CDs. We don’t have stand alone CD players in the house any more. We use our computers for music. I have a pair of nice BOSE speakers hooked into my computer and that does quite an admirable job of providing my tunes. The lad has a pretty good set of speakers hooked into his computer along with a good set of headphones. But we still don’t use CDs in this age of mp3s.

I have a subscription to Napster, which the lad and I both share. He will use the service to listen to new music (or browse older classics) and then he goes to iTunes to purchase and download tunes to his iPod. I don’t purchase much music usually. I’m pretty satisfied with the Napster service—I can create individualized playlists to my heart’s content and play them whenever I want. If there is something I want to take on the road with me, it’s easy enough to purchase favorite tunes and burn a CD.

In all, it’s probably more expensive than just buying CDs, but by doing things this way, I don’t have to worry about a dozen different sets of proprietary software or sneaky, buggy software or buying entire CDs if there are only a couple of tunes on one that I like.

Someday, maybe, the music industry will get back to the idea that when customers buy a CD, they just want to play it when and where they like and maintain total ownership of it without a bunch of high-handed rules that limit true ownership. The way it looks now is that buying a CD only gives me rental rights with increasingly limiting lease agreements. Until that changes, I’m not buying CDs.

(link via Scout Prime)