Sony’s hypocrisy scandalizes
Jordan Ruud, Staff Writer
The music industry has been uniquely, obnoxiously strident in its insistence on property rights. But when delusion clashes with hypocrisy — oh, the fireworks!
Record label Sony BMG, infamous these days for being among the most zealous of labels to go after consumers for file-sharing, has itself been caught out in an infraction of similarly dire legal consequence.
The French company PointDev has accused Sony BMG of installing pirated software on its computers, indicating that it caught the label via a pirated product key. A raid carried out by the Business Software Alliance revealed that 47 percent of Sony BMG’s software is pirated.
By contrast with the exorbitant penalties Sony BMG has extorted from consumers in settlements and lawsuits, PointDev is suing the corporation for a comparatively mild 300,000 euros (a little over a half-million dollars).
With this incident, added to the 2005 security scares involving allegations of spyware on certain Sony-distributed discs, Sony BMG’s management of technology and public relations has proven inept at best.
On a practical level, we can approach Sony BMG’s clammy-handed reliance on these ill-gotten warez as nothing more than an object lesson in irony. Or we can consider the instructive aspects of this situation: the notion of a conglomerate viciously policing its own property rights and infringing on others’.
For one thing, it’s a question of scale. Consumers, countering the music industry’s ongoing belligerent enforcement of intellectual property rights, have argued that file-sharing does no real harm: that it’s more sensible to download a single song than buy a useless album crammed with filler for that one track.
By contrast with consumers browbeaten for downloading singles, Sony BMG’s possession of so much illegal software seems a little ridiculous. One begins to wonder who exactly is in charge over there.
In any case, the electronic music industry represented by iTunes and its ilk has gone some way toward deflating arguments about consumers forced to waste money on mediocre physical product. Though the iTunes model remains flawed by an incomplete selection of files and the lack of lossless audio options, there’s no denying that officially-sanctioned electronic music technology lends itself far better to consumer choice than previous business models.
But when a major label, itself fervent in enforcing its property rights, is itself caught out — it’s hard not to see it as some kind of sign that the situation is inescapable, that a new concept of property rights has so penetrated the fabric of modern life that trying to reverse it is pointless.
Perhaps a watershed incident like this calls for a new kind of amnesty: a more relaxed attitude on the part of media corporations previously behind the frightening specter of lawsuits.
As always, it’s sensible to take consumer voices into account. It doesn’t seem to be conclusively established whether filesharing boosts or hurts the profits of media companies, and they’d do well to look further into this — not with foregone conclusions about the results of filesharing in relation to their economy, but with a genuine eye toward balance.
What will benefit both the company and the consumer most? It’s a basic question, but one from which the filesharing lawsuits have increasingly moved away. It’s time to re-attune their business models and recoup some of what the greedy single mothers and 80-year-old grandparents have irretrievably taken away via Kazaa.
Do Some Talkin’ Back
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in all Talkback Forums are those of individual writers and not of The Collegian or its staff. The Collegian reserves the right to remove posts as it sees fit.
^ Top of Page