Some of you may remember last June when we posted our 230 Days of Customer Service Hell Over Sony DRM after playing a Trey Anastasio CD in our computer — which was then viciously attacked with a rootkit virus — and keeping track of back and forth e-mails/calls with Sony trying to rectify the matter for 230 days.
Thanks to links from Boing Boing, Consumerist and others, someone at Sony finally got their act together and got us our refund check and replacement disc.

Nearly a year later, as Apple starts selling DRM-free music through its successful iTunes Store and musicians are choosing to give away their music while finding alternate revenue streams, Sony is trying out their DRM program on the other end of the entertainment industry - DVDs.

From Slashdot last night:

“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.”

It appears Sony’s fear of paying customers making personal copies of DVDs, ripping them into digital files to play on iPods and choosing to use DVD content in a non-traditional way is forcing them to sell movies that are virtually unplayable for customers who own a DVD player older than 6 months (our best guess).

If you’ve purchased one of these DVDs, e-mail Sony Pictures Entertainment and call 1-888-476-6972.

Be on the lookout for another exchange, refund program and yet another PR fiasco for Sony, who continually proves how much they despise their own paying customers by selling them products riddled with DRM.