Not content with the bad PR of suing customers, or the dubious ethics of sabotaging file sharing (which do have legitimate uses), the recorded music industry has excelled itself by annoying customers and reducing the value of their product simultaneously.

Why make your product look worse with a warning that you have to pay for it, aimed at people who have already bought it?

In general the old media have very little idea with how to cope with new media and would rather see everything invented more recently than colour television banned altogether. They have consistently tried to hold back advances that are good for consumers. Here is a little list:

• The Betamax case was an attempt to ban video recorders.
• MGM vs Grokster attempted to ban software that has legitimate uses (legitimate even by the standards of of the ridiculously strong current copyright laws)
• Films on DVD are encrypted to prevent people in the wrong region watching them. If you want to watch a film that has not been released in your region, you had better have a multi region player (and the next version of the encryption system is likely to put an end to those) or buy a player for every region in which you have bought films, or do just forget it.
• Copy prevention everything they can (music, films etc.), to prevent consumers from taking copies for their own use (for example to play in a car, on a computer etc.) or what they have already paid for

That said the media industry is not alone in this. Car manufacturers have attempted to tie customers to their dealer network for repairs through designing cars to require proprietary equipment for repairs and even routine maintenance. Nikon uses encryption to prevent customers from the highest quality version of their own photographs except by using Nikon’s own software (or software written by a company authorised to do so by Nikon). The media are the worst offenders.