Here’s some good news:
Sony to stop making protected CDs:
Beleaguered Sony BMG will temporarily suspend the manufacture of copy-protected CDs and re-examine its digital-rights management strategy, the media giant said on Friday.
Maybe this stinging criticism from the Department of Homeland Security made them nervous?
[A]t a U.S. Chamber of Commerce-sponsored event in downtown Washington on combating intellectual-property theft … Stewart Baker, recently appointed by President Bush as the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary for policy … wrapped up his opening comments with the following admonition for the industry:
“I wanted to raise one point of caution as we go forward, because we are also responsible for maintaining the security of the information infrastructure of the United States and making sure peoples’ [and] businesses’ computers are secure. … There’s been a lot of publicity recently about tactics used in pursuing protection for music and DVD CDs in which questions have been raised about whether the protection measures install hidden files on peoples’ computers that even the system administrators can’t find.”
In a remark clearly aimed directly at Sony and other labels, Stewart continued: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it’s important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.
“If we have an avian flu outbreak here and it is even half as bad as the 1918 flu epidemic, we will be enormously dependent on being able to get remote access for a large number of people, and keeping the infrastructure functioning is a matter of life and death and we take it very seriously.”
It would be appropriate, in my opinion, if all of the executives in charge of this cascade of truly lame decisions would just resign.
Ed Bott 
Too late is right. This is simply the last tiny nudge I needed to convince myself to sell my PS2 and start saving for an Xbox 360. In fact, maybe I’ll just get a 1st gen Xbox for now until the 360 comes down a bit price-wise. But Sony has completely lost me as a customer. I’m still happy to use my Trinitron TV, as it’s a good piece of hardware, but I’ll not be purchasing anything made by Sony anymore. It’s not worth supporting a company that would so completely violate the trust of it’s own customers.
I had hoped Sony would provide a universal uninstaller to remove their DRM completely and prevent its reinsatllation on a given machine. Sony needs to provide this so IT managers can clean up the mess without contacting Sony for each individual PC. Maybe Sony wants to foot the bill for the cleanup. I might be available for $250 per hour….
By the way Sony, when do you start recalling all these “digital land mines” you produced?
Aw, come-on Ed, you know that won’t happen. After all, they’re business men, here to protect copyright, not play politics. Besides, it’ll be fun to see how they explain why their contractor infringed copyright.
Anyway, enough of the sarcasm.