1

That's amazingly ironic.  

"They've created a system in which even the honest are given an incentive to break in."

That isn't especially new - most DRM systems operate in such a manner.  DRM is a fundamentally flawed concept.  The whole point is to allow someone "legitimate" to consume content.  The only way to effectively accomplish that is to make the process of consuming content more complicated.  This often makes the content harder to consume, making "unsecured" content more convenient, even to those who are legitimate consumers.  The only perfectly secure DRM system is a system in which content cannot be consumed.

I  wonder what the true effect of DRM and/or piracy is on sales.  Most studies are inconclusive and difficult to extract meaningful results from (i.e. they only tell you how many pirated copies exist, not why they were pirated or if the pirates were likely consumers in the first place, etc...)  As you say, most DRM doesn't actually succeed in protecting anything, so why put the honest customer through the hassle and engender the bad PR?  Must be a security theater thing, aimed at investors and stockholders or something... (smaller companies like Stardock seem to do ok with no DRM...)

2

Plextor did a nice job on this drive, and I don't regret buying it. It also can read and write CDs and DVDs, and it's faster at writing than the previous external drive I had (which is now in storage), plus it can read BDs. So it was a good purchase.

But for BDs, all I can do with it is rip them. Truly amazing.

3 This isn't the only bone-headed copy protection move Sony has made, either.  Aside from the rootkit debacle ( which I'm sure you already know about ), the latest version of the PSP Sony is making. . .

Well, they completely redesigned the thing to add additional copy-protection features.  And by that, I mean "no physical media, download only" and "no ability to remove and replace the battery, requires shipping to the manufacturer."

While i haven't heard anything about it, would not shock if their own brand of MP3 players are also overburdened with DRM.

4

aimed at investors and stockholders

Investors, perhaps. You can always find a small number of people and fool them (q.v. PT Barnum). Stockholders are supposed to have that collective-wisdom thing going on. They should know it's a waste of money.

There's been copy protection since... well... ever. Little wavy lines printed on paper money, Apple ][ discs written at the wrong speed, that green-line thing on VHS tapes, audio CD copy protection (which could be broken with such advanced technology as a magic marker, or by having the elite hacking skill to turn off "autoplay" in Windows), and now the various DVD and BD stuff... By now, the real world knows "copy protection" doesn't stop anyone who will put in even the least bit of effort.

The content producers would probably make more money by not spending it on alleged anti-piracy technology. Spend it on practically anything else, wind up with a better product, and sell more stuff. (Or spend it on nothing, and wind up with a cheaper product.) Opportunity costs and that supply/demand curve are Econ 101 stuff, you'd think they'd know...

Trying to make functional copy protection, as it stands now, is like that old definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

Cyncially, of course, it's just to have something else to throw at the criminals... not only are you a felon for copying our intellectual property, and a felon again for distributing it over state lines, you're a felon a third time for subverting the copy protection! (And maybe a fourth time for possessing the means to do so... shame on us all for owning computers and sharpie pens and screwdrivers and stuff.)

5 In many cases, it might be economic illiteracy.  In Sony's case, I blame rampant megalomania.

6

They weren't doing it for stockholders and investors. They were doing it for the media companies, who are really the ones at fault here. I don't blame Sony for this; it was something they pretty much had to do in order to get companies like Warner to release product in the Blu-Ray format.

The media companies have been responsible for a whole lot of bone-headed plays in the last fifteen years. (The Sony root-kit debacle was the responsibility of the media division of Sony.)

7 The only truly effective copy protection system I am aware of was Sony's SACD format.  No one made the equipment to copy the disks, or even blank media.  Success!
Or not. 
Few people bought them and Sony finally dumped the format themselves.  It's a shame, because they sounded noticeably better than CDs.  A few specialty labels still release SACD recordings, though.

8

Reminds me of the old Alternate Reality video game series by Data Soft. It was supposed to be a seven-game series, which really doesn't sound like much until you remember it came out in 1985, back when the phrase "sequel fever" was thought of as nothing more than the pop-culture equivalent of doom-mongering ("Sure, low budget horror movies like Friday the 13th might someday try to crank out a fourth sequel, but mainstream Hollywood is too creative to run out of ideas! Just look at the previews for E.T.!"). 

Anyhow, the game was a basic dungeon crawl remarkable for its amazingly smooth first-person view (not limited to stepping from one grid square to the next, it was more like Castle Wolfenstein, only on a postage-stamp sized viewing area thanks to the limitations of the Commodore 64) and the promise that characters would eventually be able to move freely between areas in this huge virtual world just by swapping episodes of the series in and out of your 360k disk drive. The games were even named after the areas they unlocked... The City, The Dungeon, The Arena, and so on. Truly, as much a triumph of marketing as it was a triumph of graphics ("But MOM, I gotta get the next one or I'll never make it into The Palace!")

Except for one problem. The copy protection would mark your character as "dead" on the save game disk when you loaded it, and would only mark him as "alive" again if you properly saved. Rage quit, and it was basically as if you died... or if the power goes out, your Mom decides you need to play outside and pulls the plug, etc. Death was penalized by the permanent loss of one irreplacable point from your highest statistic. And woe be unto you if you tried to reverse it with a hex editor, because if there was even a single bit of data that didn't sit with the massive pile of parity and summation checks on the disk, when you loaded the game it would dump you straight into an unwinnable fight with "FBI Agents" that would "hack you with Long Arm of the Law for 9999999999 damage."

Worse, the game was pretty bug-ridden (in an era where nerds would storm the gates of Atari if the game didn't consistently give you 100 million lives if you jiggled the cartridge in a specific way). And a crash was a death, and death was permanent gimping. UNLESS you got the pirate version, which not only wouldn't cost you anything if you died and needed to be "re-joined," but also had an QWK mail feed where players could report bugs and even suggest fixes, and the fix would be released to the pirate BBS networks shortly after the pirates determined it worked (no virus checkers, because computer viruses were thought of as the stuff of dumb sci-fi shows, akin to tribbles).

Long story short, the free warez proved so much more popular than the retail game that The Dungeon barely made a profit, and the third game, The Arena, sold only 20 copies (on the Amiga, a next-gen computer too expensive for the non-profit pirates to afford at the time). So I never made it to The Palace anyhow.