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Sony Japan to Abolish Copy Controlled CDs

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the music-wants-to-be-free dept.

Gridle writes "In a complete reversal of their policy and on the heels of Avex's partial cessation of copy protected CDs (translation), Sony Music Entertainment in Japan has announced that it will abolish its Label Gate CCCD format (translation) beginning in November 2004 and move back to normal CD-audio format discs for all future releases. Reasons cited are music users' increased consciousness about copyrights and maintenance of legality (conformity to the CD-audio format specification). In related news, Sony also released a slightly updated HD walkman (translation) due to pressure from the iPod, but because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback."

3 of 251 comments (clear)

  1. Good For Sony by ZSmitty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is a good move by Sony. Discs with the protection are incredibly annoying. Sure, people will pirate stuff and do things with non-protected discs illegally, but this is becoming less frequent, and for people who actually buy their music honestly, it is an incredible annoyance to not be able to do what you want with your own personal music. Thanks Sony.

  2. Sony has been forced by the market... by manonthemoon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    to face reality. It sounds like the war between its content producing arms and consumer electronics groups has been decided in favor of the electronics group.

    It was inevitable- "MP3 players" is the *name* of the categorty and the defining feature of compressed audio devices.

    If you cannot rip a CD to mp3 its value to the consumer is lessened considerably and they will be more likely to turn to p2p alternatives. A losing proposition all around for Sony.

    It may be too little too late- kind of sad as they could have owned they category if they had only been unhampered by their content divisions (and had some better human interface engineers for their software).

  3. Say Goodbye To Sales by hereschenes · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "... but because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback."

    Sounds pretty stupid to me... for many not-particularly-tech-savvy (NPTS) people, mp3 is still the compressed music format of choice, and these people will be most of Sony's market for this device.

    NPTS Customer: Hey that looks cool, does it have mp3?
    Salesman: No, but it has...
    NPTS Customer: Ah we'll leave it - what else you got?/p?

    --
    More like... nerdular nerdence!