Buyers Pissed Off With Copy Protection? Pretend It Was A Mistake

Miscellaneous

from the sense-a-pattern? dept

It looks like the entertainment industry has a new strategy for dealing with situations where consumers get seriously pissed off about new copy protection technology: they pretend it was all a “mistake.” That’s what TiVo claimed when their copy protection wouldn’t let some customers save shows for an indefinite period of time. The latest was that about a week ago the band Switchfoot got a lot of publicity for having a member of the band put a post on the band’s own forum apologizing for the copy protection and giving instructions on how to get around it. Having bands tell people how to get around copy protection is nothing new, but this one got a lot of extra attention for some reason. So much attention, in fact, that the label is now claiming the copy protection was a “mistake” and they’re recalling the CD. Somehow, you get the feeling that if this didn’t get so much press attention, it wouldn’t have been a “mistake” at all. It’s still not clear why these labels are putting this technology on CDs. If the idea is to prevent file sharing, that clearly isn’t happening. All of these CDs still have songs on file sharing networks. The only purpose seems to be to make the actual buyers of the CD feel like criminals. Even more interesting, in this story, though, is that the original post with the band member apologizing and telling fans how to get around the copy protection has been removed from the Sony owned website. So, even though the label will give people new CDs that will let people make digital copies, they won’t let anyone know how to do it with the existing “mistake” CDs. It seems like perhaps the only real “mistake” was that Sony wasn’t monitoring the fan forums before letting content go up.