Last year, SONY visited the Rootkit DRM fiasco upon consumers of many of its CDs. This allowed various very serious and even lethal computer infections - and was very hard to get rid of.
The RIAA and CRIA (both of which count SONY as a major big four member) want Canadian anti-circumvention legislation modelled after American law to protect SONY’s right to continue to deploy DRM and prevent circumvention of said DRM. The legislation that is being sought and which rumour says we will likely soon see may actually make it illegal to circumvent such affliction in the future. Technically, that is the case now in the USA. Just because nobody has been yet sued yet, never say “never”. The RIAA is suing dead grandmothers for copyright infringement.
This year, certain SONY laptop lithium batteries cause certain Dell laptops (that haven't succumbed to the Rootkit infection) to engage in spontaneous computer combustion.
Hopefully, this is just a catastrophic corporate coincidence. Whatever the reason, it's bound to "heat up" the market. Hopefully, SONY (and the RIAA and CRIA) won’t be seeking legislation to prevent consumers and firefighters from extinguishing computer fires caused by systems with “flaming”, "blazing" or “incendiary” performance. ;-)
These two innovative developments - Rootkit + Blazing Batteries - have certainly generated a lot of free publicity for SONY. This makes it nothing if not ironic that that SONY has applied to register the trade-mark LIKE NO OTHER for wares and services that include, you guessed it, compact discs and batteries. No, I’m not making this up. See Canadian TM application #1232337
Should SONY and its trade associations, RIAA/CRIA, be determining the future of Canadian copyright law?
CAVEAT EMPTOR.
CAVEAT LEGISLATOR.
HK
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People are often under the false impression that the controversy with DRM is about copyright holders putting protections on something they can be said to own, which is their content.
ReplyDeleteThe real nasty stuff is actually because DRM is actually something that is placed on something they do not own, which is our communications tools.
My hope is that many Canadians will sign the Petition to protect Information Technology property rights so that legislators will stop attacking our property rights, but also that Canadians will read the petition text and start thinking of themselves as rightsholders who need to have their tangible property rights protected from the real rights infringers out there -- companies like SONY!