Sony’s copy-protected DVDs

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Taking a page out of corporate half-sibling Sony BMG’s playbook, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment is offering customers replacement copies of the DVDs they bought with problematic copy-protection software. The software was designed to buttress the protection provided by CSS, the standard anti-copying technology on DVDs. But just as CSS doesn’t stop anyone who really wants to copy a DVD, nor did Sony’s ARccOS. There plenty of work-arounds for bootleggers, and pirated copies of DVDs with ARccOS made their way online just as quickly, it seems, as the discs without it. Instead, the only purpose served by the software was to frustrate and alienate legitimate buyers of Sony DVDs by rendering the discs unplayable in some machines. A thin and imperfect layer of copy-protection has been enough to support a multi-billion-dollar DVD business; rather than making conventional DVDs harder to copy, maybe Sony should concentrate on building the market for the next generation of home video products, high-definition DVDs.