Even though the music industry has pretty much done away with trying to cripple CDs with copy protection mainly due to compatibility issues, it seems like the movie companies have not learned from the mistakes of the music labels when it comes to crippling DVDs.
Pretty much every Sony DVD player owner would expect to be able to at least play titles produced by Sony pictures. However, not only has Sony caused major problems with crippling audio CDs, such as the infamous Rootkits example, they have managed to break a few of its own DVD players with a recent update to its ARccOS copy-protection system being used on some DVDs. According to Mick, the writer of this blog who owns the CX995V DVD player, he was disappointed to find that two titles by Sony Pictures he rented would reach the splash title screen and then get stuck for around 60 seconds before the player shuts off.
Sony has finally fixed this issue in an updated version of its ARccOS copy protection. According to this report, the affected discs gave compatibility issues with certain Sony, Toshiba and Harman Kardon DVD players, where several hundred complaints were made to Sony and on discussion forums about the issue. Originally Sony planned on offering a firmware update, but has decided to start offering replacement discs to customers with the affected titles.
From what I can see, even though Sony may be offering replacements for those who bought the discs, those who rented the affected discs would have been left with the same frustration as receiving a badly scratched rental. Only in this case, the customer may not be able to get the rental fee refunded, since if the shop noticed the disc was scratch free and it plays in the shops own DVD player, the clerk would assume it’s the customer's own DVD player at fault. Finally in the worst case scenario that the customer tried another affected rental DVD and ended up with the same issue, they may end up throwing out a perfectly good DVD player to get a replacement assuming their player has finally packed up and not realising the problems Sony is causing with its copy protection!
Thanks to Aktiv8, mrdataNY, GristyMcFisty and DeadMan for letting us know about this news.
