Sony DVDs in Trouble Again

Couple of stories from Slashdot point to more woes from Sony. They just can't seem to get basic customer relations right, as in "Thou shalt not blatantly screw the customer over..."

New Sony DVDs Not Working In Some Players Sunday April 15

It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of 'feature' that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn't appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it's up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.

They seemed to have cleared it up now though - not that they will have learned their lesson or anything (as evidenced by past behavior...)

Sony Fixes Problems With New DVDs Wednesday April 18

Following up on reports that DVDs for some Sony titles were causing problems, Video Business is reporting that Sony has fixed the copy-protection problem on recent DVD releases, and will provide replacement discs to customers. The problem was with the ARccOS DRM system. The company issued the following statement: 'Recently, an update that was installed on approximately 20 titles was found to cause an incompatibility issue with a very small number of DVD players (Sony has received complaints on less than one thousandth of one percent of affected discs shipped)... Since then, the ARccOS system has once again been updated, and there are no longer any playability problems.' Customers can call 800-860-2878 to inquire about replacement discs.

Sure, hardly any complaints at all, notice how quickly they point that out...