The Sony/MP3 Saga Continues

Renegade Lisp writes "Sony's rolling out their new line of flash-based music players to the market these days. More stylish than ever, they surely look like a serious attempt to regain territory lost to the iPod, and perhaps even to create the Walkman of the 21st century. And it looks like Sony has finally given in to consumer pressure: these new "MP3 players" can finally play MP3 natively, not just Sony's proprietary ATRAC format. But wait -- you cannot just put your MP3s onto the device, you have to run them through Sony's obfuscation software first. The obfuscated files, when installed properly on the device, can be played. But you can't just move them around, share them with your friends, whatever. Well, of course the obfuscation scheme has already been broken by a brave hacker. But is this really the way to create the "Network Walkman" of the 21st century? Sony, please wake up!"

Comments

Re:You People don't get it

[gl4ss]

well. sony sells 'em as mp3 players. if they don't want them to exist they could, you know, stop selling them.

they even have sold real mp3 players(that play from cd's) from time to time. they even sell hardware to burn cd's. all of which gets basically advertised with giving you the possibility to listen to _your_ music whereever _you_ want. minidisc is all about copying, too.

and well, the beef here is that there is a lot of mp3's out there that are perfectly legal to copy to your friends. I'd like there to be a perfect drm scheme - BUT ONE THAT WOULD KEEP THE INTENTED TO BE FREE SONGS AROUND! would give hell of a boost to independent music.

ipod killer for sure.

[mike518]

this is an ipod killer for sure!! ... just like last month... and the month before.

maybe they should just specialize in ipod killers rather than mp3 players. Darn, except i guess they arnt any good at that either.