According to Sci-Tech Today, Sony Corp. has announced it is laboring to develop a technological scheme called “sterile burning” that would prevent DRM-protected audio from being burned more than once. You can’t get the details of how the technology would work from the Sci-Tech story — only a general description of how it’s supposed to function.

On the good side, consider that Sony is not trying to prevent all user copying, but instead is trying to put some kind of limit on it. That shows that the company is at least somewhat alert to what consumers would likely complain about.

The downside is this: here we have a technology company attempting to hobble one of the chief advances of the digital age — the ability of ordinary users to make unlimited copies of the content they’ve purchased. Still, it’s less of a threat to consumer expectations if it arises in the free market than if it comes in the form of some government mandate, so for that, at least, we should be thankful. If the limitations on consumer copying are intolerable, the market can vote with its feet.

I strongly suspect, given what I know about DRM, that there’s at least one sidestep Sony’s technologists won’t be able to block — analog capture and digital reconversion of audio content. In other words, if the music is good enough to listen to, then it’s good enough to capture from an analog output and redigitize … without DRM. And that will remain simple enough even for relatively non-expert consumers to do.

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