The "arms race" between content owners (eg, Sony Music) and gadget makers (eg, Sony Consumer Entertainment) is continuing apace.
As far as content owners - such as record companies - are concerned, the culture of unauthorised copying is a big problem. In the UK, two-thirds of households have copied CD music or games. And it isn't just kids: over-55s are just as likely to copy as teenagers and, surprisingly, women are more likely to copy than men.
This culture will be hard to change, which is why content owners want computer and consumer electronics equipment to enforce their business models for them. But they are not. When Sony and Phillips recently showed new technology for recording 100 hours of music on a single CD, the British Phonographic Industry called it "bad news for the music industry", while the president of Sony Consumer Electronics said "the music companies need to change their business model". But there is little evidence they have.
In 1825, when the proponents of the new-fangled railroad were petitioning the British parliament for permission to lay the first commercial tracks between Liverpool and Manchester, canal owners began lobbying to stop the use of steam engines to transport goods and passengers. Since the railway would be much faster, and cheaper, it would benefit the economy as a whole. But for canal owners, the railway meant, as one Thomas Baines put it, an end to their "dreams of a sanguine avarice". What better description of how the IT world sees record companies.
Industry efforts to extend and embrace MP3, peer to peer and the "rip, mix, burn" culture continue despite a poor start. Sony and Universal's Pressplay and the independent Rhapsody have about 50,000 subscribers each. Warner, EMI and BMG Music's MusicNet has 10,000. In comparison, KaZaA, the largest P2P network, has more than 200m registered users.
Now BT is getting in on that. It launched its Dotmusic on Demand (DoD) service last month. For a tenner a month, you can have unlimited low-quality (32Kbps) streamed audio and limited Windows Media Player format downloads for CD burning. It is PC-only but Apple is planning to launch its own service.
The BT service may appeal to some - people who don't want EMI artists on their CDs, for example, because EMI hasn't granted burning privileges. Or people who don't like Sony artists such as Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen. Or people who don't like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, also missing from DoD.
I don't see how the service can succeed in this incarnation, but surely there would have been many people happy to pay a tenner a month to have carried on using Napster: it worked, it was convenient, it was easy and it was cross-platform. It was also fun, delivering serendipity alongside songs.
The record companies should have bought it instead of acting like canal owners paying lawyers to try to get the government to legislate against the railway.
