Hackers have
broken the DRM in Sony's massively popular PSP (Play Station Portable)
gaming and entertainment platform, making several protected games freely
available by copying them from a pirate website onto Sony Memory Stick devices
and thence onto PSPs. Sony has released an update to its firmware and will
make future games impervious to the hack by requiring the updated firmware to be
installed.
This is yet another in a string of embarrassments to the consumer electronics
and entertainment content behemoth concerning its DRM strategy. In 2002,
Sony's CD copy-protection technology was found to be defeatable by drawing on
CDs with a black felt-tip pen. Then, the following year, Sony
launched an online
music service called Connect that used its proprietary OpenMG DRM and ATRAC
audio compression format; the service was late to market and featured inferior
music selection, pricing, and user interface software compared to competitors
such as iTunes and Rhapsody. Sony is currently
preparing to relaunch
the widely panned service.
Sony should, by all rights, be at the forefront of DRM. After all, it
is the only company in the world with significant presences in both the consumer
electronics (CE) and content markets. Its entertainment executives are in
unique positions to understand the possibilities and limitations of DRM-related
technology, and its CE execs are analogously well situated to understand the
needs of entertainment businesses regarding business models and copyright
issues. The gaps between these two sides of the business should be easier
to close within the same company than they are between "pure" content business
(think Disney) and "pure" CE firms (think Panasonic). That Sony has been
unable to bridge the gap internally does not bode well for the industry as a
whole.
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