Epic/Sony goes to far

The Epic/Sony record label may have gone too far this time in their fight for copy-protection. In Germany and some other European states, the recently released new album by mega-star Celine Dion is embedded with Key2Audio copy-protection software to prevent the audio CD from even being played in a PC or Mac CD-ROM drive. Worse yet, Sony admitted that inserting the audio CD into your CD-ROM drive will intentionally crash your system. What? You read right. Sony has essentially thrown away good business practices and initiated total disregard for their customers. What if the CD-ROM drive on your computer is the only CD-player you own? Then, I argue, Sony has committed fraud by selling an audio CD to a customer that will not be able to use the product they purchased. The irony here is that Sony makes computers and other multimedia electronics, yet this latest move by Sony only places a speed bump in the path of making traditional stereo and TV units obsolete in favor of multimedia appliances that combine functions into single machines and ultimately save consumers space and money. Click here for Yahoo.com’s “Dion’s new CD crashing party for some users.”