News written by Jari Ketola (January, 2005)

President of Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) Ken Kutaragi has stated that Sony has missed out on the sales of MP3 players and other gadgets by sticking to proprietary formats such as ATRAC. ATRAC (Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding) is a psychoacoustic audio coding and compression system used exclusively by Sony in, for example, MiniDisc devices and Sony Connect online music store.

According to Kutaragi he and other Sony employees have been frustrated with the company's reluctance to release products that support the more popular MP3 format, such as the Apple iPod. The reason for the reluctance was mostly because Sony, which is also a major player in the music and movie industry, has had concerns about content rights.

The tables are slowly turning at Sony, and Kutaragi sees that new devices, such as the PlayStation Portable (PSP) will help Sony to reach levels of success it enjoyed in the past with Walkman and other innovative products.

Sony is boosting production to one million a month this spring to keep up with demand for the PSP. The device has sold over 800,000 units in Japan since going on sale December 12th. US and European launches are set for this spring.

Sony has filed a patent application which describes several methods for using wireless connections in portable game machines. The methods described could very well be used with the PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming device in the future.

The patent application, filed in June 2003, describes, for instance, ways of connecting a portable device to a "base computing device" which would do all the resource intensive calculations and feed the data to the portable device. The device would be responsible for mostly just playing back video and audio.

In addition to using the wireless connection to enable more complex games, the application suggest that content could be downloaded wirelessly to the device. The content would not be limited to just games, but would cover other digital content as well -- such as movies and music.

Sony has not commented on the application or it's connections to PSP. PlayStation Portable is expected to be launched in the US in March 2005.

Source: Gamespot

An unsatisfied customer has sued Apple Computer Inc. for "forcing" iTunes customers to buy an iPod player if they wish to listen to the music purchased from iTunes on a portable device. The customer, Thomas Slattery, is seeking an unspecified amount of damages. Apple uses their own FairPlay DRM protection on iTunes which is only playable using either the iTunes software or an iPod player.

Antitrust experts see the lawsuit as a long shot. The key would be to show that iTunes is a market of its own with no real alternatives. There are, however, several competing digital music stores in the market that provide the same or similar content.

"Apple has unlawfully bundled, tied, and/or leveraged its monopoly in the market for the sale of legal online digital music recordings to thwart competition in the separate market for portable hard drive digital music players, and vice-versa," the suit charged.

Finding the case against Apple would pretty much outlaw all proprietary DRM schemes. Obviously it's highly unlikely that the customer will win the case, but at least the issue with iTunes' DRM is brought to wider attention.