A PATENT filed by Sony last week suggests it may once again be considering preventing consumers making “too many” back-up copies of its CDs.
Such a move would be controversial. In November 2005 Sony was forced to withdraw anti-piracy software it had placed on its CDs to restrict the number of copies a buyer could make because it introduced security vulnerabilities to Windows operating systems.
Sony’s latest idea is to place a piece of monitoring hardware inside the CD. Its patent suggests embedding a radio-frequency ID chip that could be interrogated wirelessly by a PC or CD player. The chip would record the number of times…
