Sony Vs. Sony

[Ryan Sutter]

>I will not buy anything Sony in the near future, not because of their 
>Mac support, but because of their politics. They are also a movie 
>company, in addition to selling the equipment that most of us watch 
>movies on. So they build in hardware that won't work if it thinks 
>you're trying to make an illegal copy of one of their movies. 
>Case-in-point, I have a DVMC-DA2 converter to convert my old VHS and 
>8mm video tapes to DV. If I pop in a video with Macrovision encoding, 
>the unit will refuse to convert it to digital. Nevermind that I may 
>actually own the copyright to said video. Nevermind that even if I 
>don't, I may be making a legit backup of it. Etc. My time is too 
>valuable to hassle with equipment that thinks it knows better than me 
>what I'm allowed to do.

Sony is one very conflicted group of companies, competing against and even suing each other.  Wired did a very interesting article on them here http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/sony_pr.html.  A relavent quote:

"As a member of the Consumer Electronics Association, Sony joined the chorus of support for Napster against the legal onslaught from Sony and the other music giants seeking to shut it down. As a member of the RIAA, Sony railed against companies like Sony that manufacture CD burners. And it isn't just through trade associations that Sony is acting out its schizophrenia. Sony shipped a Celine Dion CD with a copy-protection mechanism that kept it from being played on Sony PCs. Sony even joined the music industry's suit against Launch Media, an Internet radio service that was part-owned by - you guessed it - Sony. Two other labels have since resolved their differences with Launch, but Sony Music continues the fight, even though Sony Electronics has been one of Launch's biggest advertisers and Launch is now part of Yahoo!, with which Sony has formed a major online partnership. It's as if hardware and entertainment have lashed two legs together and set off on a three-legged race, stumbling headlong into the future."

So, you can support Sony and boycott them at the same time...  just depends on which Sony you're referring too...

Ryan

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