<RANT>
How, you ask, can Sony Music and Universal Music crush the Internet to shore
up their business model,
Graham?
Well, imagine if, in a few years time, your ISP put a box into their network
which cut off all bulk downloads after, say, 200K, unless they were
accompanied by a cryptographic licence certificate; and all other ISPs did
the same to avoid legal liability for copyright infringement. Or if your
ISP blocked peer-to-peer connections from customers' machines to anything not
on a list of legitimate servers (after all, legitimate consumers have no
business connecting to each others' computers without going through a
central server; only pirates and hackers would want to do that). Sony have
the technical expertise to implement something like this (and as senior VP
Steve Heckler suggests, are working on it), and they and Universal (who have
been most aggressive in the offensive against the Net) have literally billions
of dollars to spend on lawyers, lobbyists and the odd crooked politician.
A lot of US ISPs already automatically delete MP3 files on users' web
sites to avoid legal liability; automatically filtering content using
a easy-to-install box from Sony isn't that far removed from this.
(And then there's the operating system issue; a secure SDMI-like audio player,
like a legal software DVD player, will never run on Linux or anything
open-source, as the SDMI model assumes that the customer is a potential thief,
and under Linux the customer could alter the system to steal Sonyversal's
jealously guarded content.)
They are willing, and quite probably able, to push in an Orwellian
revenue-protection régime; and that's reason enough to not buy anything
from them.
</RANT>