Time To Short Sony

Attention stockholders: you know, I remember a day when Sony stood for the best technology available to bring entertainment to consumers. Now this misguided giant stands for sacrificing its unwitting buyers to security breaches so severe that Microsoft has to step in to try and salvage its own sinking brand. It just keeps getting worse for this company who decided to bring in Howard Stringer earlier this year, who begat Andy Lack and a string of seven figure execs who felt tech’s day was done, it was a commodity business and the big money was in content.

Fed by the success of Spiderman…. they went to town. Now after one of their worst quarters, their music division in a shambles from infighting… we have the biggest scandal yet, and it worsens by the day. If you haven’t already heard, don’t buy any Sony CD. They’re recalling them. Poor Neil Diamond, Rolling Stone was finally coming around to his schmaltzy rock. Anyway, if you put the CD on your PC, it opens a channel between your PC and Sony that can be entered by anyone else, which will monitor your PC. You’ll be vulnerable to one of the many hackers already downloading personal info off of Sony’s former customers.

If you already bought and uploaded, look out for the class action notices that will soon be appearing. So, if this isn’t the death knell of the CD, I don’t know what is. Does anyone still buy those things? Yes, there are plenty of people in little towns all over the place with no broadband. They didn’t put it everywhere. Those folks are disconnected enough to vote for Bush, and now this. Karl Rove is gonna be putting flyers in the church parking lots warning about this one, except that access to all those computers is just what he wants.

I love this story because it will alert everyone to the issues surrounding DRM – Digital Rights Management. The studios, record labels and all major content providers are obsessed with it. They have little Expos to show it to Congress. They won’t let their product off of hard files until they have it. Problem is, digital files are easy to copy. Ultimately, there is no way to completely protect against copying. Until the mechanism exists, on a widespread level, to make sure content providers get paid on the basis of the popularity their product in a transparent, quantifiable way, we will continue to see these entertainment giants at odds with their own consumers.