Sony – one of the leading companies in nowadays media world – announced to offer movies for direct download. Sony Pictures and Television International (SPTI) will use the DivX codec in combination with a copy protected container. Currently it is not known in which countries this service will be established.

Wait a sec… can this really be true?

It is 2008 and movies are getting (illegally) copied thru the internet using p2p technology for the last 10 years. No copy protection, no laywer and no law suit ever stopped the majority of people from copying content.

It seems like the movie companies did not really learn their lessons by heart. We really like Sony (Pictures) a lot. Sony is the leading company behind the Bluray disc and the Playstation 3 is a console of its own kind.

But using copy protections on movies in this situation may be very risky. Consumers are willing to pay for content but we would not expect the mass of consumers to be tolerant of copy protected content that cannot be played on home DVD players but on PC only.

iTunes for example is only tolerated by the masses because it has the well known loophole that allows to create unprotected audio CDs. These audio CDs can then be re-ripped hassle free and converted to any unprotected format.

The guys behind the music portal Bleep (http://www.bleep.com) for example got that imponderability in their heads from the very beginning and therefore they are offering music as unprotected mp3’s and in lossless FLAC. There is no other music portal that we are aware of that got such a huge catalogue and offers lossless compressed music.

Concepts containing DRM (Digital Rights Management) are the past, wake up ol’ boys, kick the lawyers and invest into your company’s future.