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Sony Japan to Abolish Copy Controlled CDs
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."
"many music users' consciousness increased to protection of copyrights"
"We really thought we could sneak this by most users, but it turns out they're more informaed than we thought. Damn you, independent media!"
Screw you all! I'm off to the pub
Any move toward trusting consumers and an industry standard is worthy of a smile. :)
Or at least, a colon and a close parenthesis.
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.
Set your faces to stun.
"Derp de derp."
See this, Bill Gates? Not ALL of you "biggies" think we're all crooks!
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
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).
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!
No more copy-protected CDs?! But why?! I was having so much fun scribbling around the edges with my beloved Sharpees..... I can still do that even if there's no point, right? Right?!?!
I have a feeling half the reason (or the only?) reason Sony is doing this, is because they happen to be involved in the electronics business that requires you to have non-copy-protected CDs as raw material. Basically I think the decision may have that since there's shitloads of profit to be made off the hardware, it may offset greater piracy in their music biz. And somebody doing the math may have realized that this is financially viable. Thus Sony has no issues with this. Maybe the RIAA should stop prosecuting file-sharers, and instead get into some kind of revenue-sharing agreement with the Sonys and Apples of world. (ok, ok, stop scoffing at the words revenue-sharing, it could happen!)
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our consumer electronics business is worth more to us than our music business.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
When you buy music and movies you are not allowed to return it to the store unless your buying the same title since you could have copied them. Would they now let you return discs with copyright protective measures for a refund since you are unable to copy them?
...but damnit they can learn if you give 'em enough time.
I'm glad to see AVEX cutting back and Sony backing off completely. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to get some soundtracks and Do As Infinity CDs without worrying about the discs being f*cked and horribly fragile.
Maybe Pony Canyon and a few other labels in Japan will follow their lead and stop shipping this crap on their CDs.
This could be bad though... I'd have no reason to not buy more stuff from them!
In an industry where the corporations are suing their customers, there is PLENTY of room for large companies to take a new stance and embrace the now pissed off consumers. If you get in on that early enough in the game, as Sony appears to be doing, then people start rallying behind you against the companies who AREN'T taking that position.
All in all, its a very smart tactical move for Sony, and reading this has restored a sliver of the faith I once had in them.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
Step One: Buy new sony player at full retail.
Step Two: There is no step two.
In this article Sony says that they are working hard to bring MP3 devices to market but they have nothing to announce at this time.
http://www.busyweather.com/
As a side note to your well put remark - whatever happened to /. crowd's usual dislike of Sony (member RIAA)? To read most comments posted here would make you think Sony is the New Angles Co. (tm).
This is just a simple decision to end a failing practice in the marketplace. Nothing more.
because of hardware limitations the device still does not support MP3 playback
What kind of hardware are they running it on that isn't capable of decoding a 128kbit MP3 in real time (which is all most people want out of an MP3 player)? An 8MHz 8086?
I mean, seriously, I used to play MP3s on my old Pentium 100MHz, while doing other work with them... their hardware would have to be very limited to not be able to keep up with that.
"Sony also released a slightly updated HD walkman (translation) due to pressure from the iPod"
With businesses, pressure generally comes from companies with comparable marketshare... Ford might feel pressure from GM, Apple might feel pressure from Rio... Sony is so far out of the main music player game, that it is ludicrous to think they are feeling "pressure" from apple... that would be like saying Be was feeling pressure from Microsoft... This is just a result of Sony fatally mis-predicting the market.
I bought a netMD minidisc player because it was cheap, and because - get this - it said that it supported mp3. It does in a way - if you can get the (apparently) godawful sonicstage software to install (not on a win98 machine, whatever the box says) then it just takes your mp3 collection and decodes/encodes to ATRAC3 on the fly as you're connecting to your walkman. I never got to try it out (still use win98) but I expect it's not the speediest transfer. It went back the next day and I got an iPod mini, and sync'd it to my wife's ibook - and got what I paid for. It's bizarre, Sony claim pressure from the iPod as a driver for getting a HD walkman out and expect the mainstream consumer to go for their product, that arguably has less market visibility that Apple's, and doesn't support the mainstream file format. And Sony won't officially support a windows installation that hasn't been factory installed - even upgrades of OEM machines aren't supported. Damn them.
Actually before everybody goes off hailing SONY for being so great and good: From everything I have seen here in japan I honestly don't think Japanese people *DO* any piracy. Sure there are the niche "maniacs" that does that, but in general the population shuns pirated software and music and movies like it's a bad disease.
Some examples:
* I bring back stacks of new movies unreleased in japan (back when LOTR:ROK was not in theatres yet), DVDs bought in china. Everyone is interested until the moment they realize it's pirated. "Oh it must be bad quality," or "ahh it's ok i'll just wait for the theatres." etc
* Japanese in piracy capitals doesn't browse the bootleg shops. At ALL.
(side note to above, they also pay full price for Luis Vuitton crap even when there are immitations for 1/100th of the price and absolutely no discernable difference). There are also no market for said immitation products in Japan.
* us foreigners are downloading movies off bittorrent that we can't get here, and we always get these looks of amazement like "oh you guys are pirating again!"
This is compared to pretty much all of my acquaintences in the US (including everyone who is not even considered "tech savvy") who downloads from kazaa or torrent or whatever. Why do you think the announcement is that they will simply end the copy-protect from Sony Japan, but not globally?
It's a moral problem, boys and girls.
My life in the land of the rising sun.