As the music labels Sony BMG and EMI believe they have perfected their copy-protection to work with legacy CD players, offer a limited backup solution to CD recordables as well as support for WMA DRM compatible portable players, they have completely left out support for the iPod. This is becoming a problem as not only does the iPod account for 80% of the market for portable digital audio players, but Sony now ships half of its discs with its new anti-piracy technology. It was only a few weeks ago that Sony planned on protecting the majority of their titles. EMI expects to start shipping protected discs this summer.
Despite strong pressure from the music labels to get Apple to open up its proprietary DRM protection, Apple insists on keeping it to themselves to bring consumers to their online iTunes music download store. At the moment, the main hot-selling title is the Backstreet Boys' album "Never Gone" with around 300,000 copies sold. For iPod owners who have a copy, it means a fairly tricky process of trying to get their music on to their iPod (if they find out how) or to repurchase the album from iTunes.
|
Both Sony BMG and EMI are rapidly increasing the number of copy-protected CDs they release in the U.S. CDs with the protective technology prevent users from posting them on the Internet and allow users to burn only three copies onto other discs, which themselves can't be copied again. Sony BMG is already selling about half its discs with the technology, while EMI releases its first this summer.
That's because the technology uses Microsoft's Windows Media software, which isn't compatiable with iPods. Read the full article here. |
I remember previously when copy protection measures were kept to a minimum for a while due to a small (<2%) compatibility issue with CD players. However, while they may have succeeded in overcoming this last percentage of compatibility to bring back copy-protection to full force, they appear to have forgotten that well over 2% of the population using portable CD Players have likely converted to using an iPod or other players incompatible with WMA DRM in the time taken to perfect their technology.
Then again, for Apple this may actually bring in more business for them, since if consumers get frustrated trying to transfer their CDs to their iPod, then chances are that they are going to get music of iTunes instead or worse still, revert back to file sharing to get iPod compatible music.
Source: Forbes - Digital Entertainment
Top news
Our Community messages
Happy Birthday to you IMSAFE 
Crabbyappleton thank you for your reaction in the news section. 
Da_Taxman just logged in, Good to see you back!