USA Today has published a piece that rounds up the Sony BMG 'rootkit' copy protection fiasco and lists the CDs sold in the US with XCP 'rootkit' copy protection. It also points out the split personality that has resulted from Sony owning both content origination and a PC business:
Sony BMG wants to discourage CD-burning. Sony Vaio, on the other hand, recently released a new $2,100 PC with a 200-CD changer, the VGX-XL1. Load up 200 blank CDs in the tray, and the computer "will be set to automatically and sequentially copy all of your content in one single session," Sony says in its promotional material.
Comment: Sony's attempt to own and control the whole value chain has backfired. It wants consumers to buy Sony-owned music and movies, play them on Sony hi-fi's and TV sets, download tunes from a Sony-owned Connect store in Sony-owned Atrac format, store them on Sony Memory Sticks with Sony Magic Gate protection, and play them on Sony music players or Sony Ericsson phones. It wants Sony games played on Sony PlayStations plugged into Sony TV sets and Sony movies on Sony UMD discs played on Sony PSPs. And so on.
But Sony's concentration on protecting its intellectual property via proprietary Sony technologies has crippled its participation in bigger markets. The whole MiniDisc industry was screwed by Sony's copy protection and its hostility to -- and fear of -- the PC industry. Sony's efforts in the portable device market have been crippled by its initial failure to support the MP3 and, now, WMA formats and by its failure to support industry standard memory cards. The growth of its games business has been restricted by its failure to support PCs, with sales of PlayStation hardware taking priority.
"Vertical integration," with corporate control of the whole value chain, is a good old-fashioned way of extracting the maximum amount of money from an industry. It works when owning one part of the business makes other parts more attractive and more profitable -- as it arguably does with Sony's proprietary games business. It doesn't work when one group's interest are antithetical to the interests of other groups, and that's Sony's problem.
