Sony's way of increasing electronic sales

There has been a small buzz the past couple weeks about Sony's new DVD protection and I was affected by it last night (and a couple nights ago).

A few nights ago, Kristen and I sat down to watch Casino Royale (the new James Bond movie). I grabbed the DVD that we rented from Netflix and stuck it into our Mitsubishi DVD player (which has been working great for almost 5 years). Nothing came up on the screen. So I took it out and looked at it to see if I could see any scratches. It looked pretty good except for a the funny reflection. So I proceeded to put the DVD into our computer and it seemed to work fine.

Hmm.... says I .... this be a strange predicament, says I.

So, I reported it as a broken DVD to Netflix and got them to send us a new one. This one worked for about 15 minutes of the movie, then bombed out on us. Could have been scratched, but it didn't look it.

It turns out that Sony has implemented a new copy protection (The Holiday / Stranger than Fiction / Casino Royale). A copy protection that's sOOOOO good that (on some DVD players) you can't even "copy" the video from your DVD player to your TV screen.

Sony says they have no plans of changing their copy protection. Another interesting fact is that their new disks won't even play on some of their own manufactured DVD players. I'm guessing that they probably spend more to "protect" their software and information than would ever be lost by people copying stuff.

We consumers better hope and pray that Sony never gets into the paperback book business. I can see it now...

NEWS
Sony implements new copy protection for their division of paperback books. Upon opening the new print run of Harry Potter, readers were surprised by a blinding light emanating from the inner binder of the book. Unfortunately, no one can read the new book because of the light. This was Sony's newest release in a long line of paperback book copy protection. When senior executives were asked about the matter, they commented "we have no intentions of changing our copy protection... at least no one will be copying them. We suggest you purchase our copy protection sunglasses for 299.99 from your nearest best buy."

I know it seems ludicrous when you talk about paper books, but for some reason digital "paper" is different. Really....they've done the same thing... they've blinded my DVD player so that it can't read the DVD. What's the difference? A book is a book, why can't a DVD be a DVD.