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Sony Pulls Controversial Anti-Piracy Software
An anonymous reader writes "Bowing to public outrage, Sony BMG has temporarily halted the use of its controversial anti-piracy software in all of its music CDs, the company said in a statement today. The move comes just a day after a top Bush administration official chided Sony and the entertainment industry for going too far: according to this story over at Washingtonpost.com, Stewart Baker, the Department of Homeland Security's policy czar warned would-be DRM makers: 'It's very important to remember that it's your intellectual property -- it's not your computer. And in the pursuit of protection of intellectual property, it's important not to defeat or undermine the security measures that people need to adopt in these days.' The Post has the full text and video of his commentary." We've reported on this story previously.
Good, now keep up the pressure. Unless Sony feels real pain for going too far it will encourage others to keep pushing the envelope on what is acceptable.
This is why punative damages for "bad behaviour" exist, to make the company take notice and change their behaviour.
Don't let them get off easy.
Macintouch reports that Sony is also putting Macintosh DRM on some of its disks. No word if these kernel extensions - PhoenixNub1.kext and PhoenixNub12.kext - are a rootkit or not, and no word if Sony is suspending their use or not.
According to the Macintouch article, the Mac DRM is on Imogen Heap's Speak for Yourself, an RCA CD distributed by Sony/BMG.
I suspect that CD-makers won't be able to keep a stunt like this secret for 8 months next time, because their customers will be watching for such shenannigans.
Now we wait for Sony to issue a recall.
"All your replacement CDs are belong to us" - Sony's customers.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
What you may get is a discount of 1$ on an already overpriced 20$ CD.
Sony made a stupid PR mistake, but they are too big a company to really suffer from it so badly, so to completely give up DRM. Come release date of PS3, and all those who critisize sony now, will line up before stall drooling...
Like it or not, fair use will be a thing of past, in the years to come.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
A day after someone in the government goes, "Naughty, naughty," Sony's suddenly pulling their DRM, if even "temporarily".
It can't be anymore obvious what Sony thinks of their customers...
People will pass up steak once a week, for crap every day.
From the Washington Post article:
[Stewart Baker, Homeland Security's assistant secretary for policy, said:]
"If we have an avian flu outbreak here and it is even half as bad as the 1918 flu epidemic, we will be enormously dependent on being able to get remote access for a large number of people, and keeping the infrastructure functioning is a matter of life and death and we take it very seriously."
Does this mean if malware keeps people from getting medical help the authors can be convicted of manslaughter?
Jury: We find the defendant guilty on each of the 100 million counts of computer tampering and 2 million counts of involuntary manslaughter.
Judge: I hereby sentence you to 10 million sentences of 2 years of probation and 2 million sentences of 6 months in jail followed by 5 years probation. Due to the outrageous nature of your conduct, sentences are to be served consecutively. You should be out in time to watch the sun swallow the earth.
Delicious!!!!!!!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Fair enough, but the millions of zombies hosted by comcast, bellsouth.net, or SBC doesn't interest them, the massive security flaws that allow any Microsoft machine to become a zombie just by connecting it to the internet and going for a pizza don't interest them, but a Van Zant (and other) CDs elicit a response from the tier 1 level?
Pardon my cynicism but I suspect that -this- received the attention because no matter what people will always buy broadband internet and people will always buy Microsoft but the paranoid with the amplifying tinfoil hats just might start to demand oversight of DRM technologies to the point where the major congressional donors of the RIAA/MPAA might suffer an induced case of the fidgets.
(Not that there's much danger of that... at this moment the #1 selling album on amazon is 12 Songs [Content/Copy-Protected CD] by Neil Diamond).
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
They're spinning this with all their might. Remember that the patch they so proudly trumpet (look how serious we are about protecting our customers!) doesn't remove the rootkit - it merely disables the cloaking feature. Also note that while they say they are suspending manufacture of these CDs, there is no mention of any effort to remove already manufactured copies from store shelves or the distribution network. Considering that CDs are stamped in large production runs and then kept in inventory, they really haven't committed to anything except to "re-examine all aspects of our content protection initiative to be sure that it continues to meet our goals of security and ease of consumer use." (and note how their goals do not include consumer privacy or control over their own electronic devices).
No, I don't think we forgive them for this for a long time yet.
I agree that Sony will probably just write a check to a bunch of lawyers and maybe fire some guys, but why can't people go to jail for these kinds of things?
It always strikes me as odd that you can fuck up thousands of people's lives (in this case, their computers), knowingly and deliberately, and the only outcome is that some lawyers get rich and a few overpaid *might* have to use their golden parachutes.
Why isn't this thousands of counts of unauthorized use of a computer? I know that "throw 'em in jail" really isn't a large-scale social solution, but there needs to be a way for our corporate leaders to understand that not only can they not steal and get away with it (cf various corporate thefts), if they abuse their corporate power and mess with people lives, you know what, you might go to jail, too.
"As a precautionary measure, Sony BMG is temporarily suspending the manufacture of CDs containing XCP technology," it said in a statement.
So why aren't they recalling the product that's already in the channel? There are thousands (millions?) of discs sitting on retailers shelves that are just waiting to install the rootkit. Oh yeah, that would hurt their bottom line.
Until it costs them, they're not going to learn.
-ch
Sure, a class action won't help consumers much. But the actual harm in this case was thankfully pretty small, anyway.
The reason you put together a class action is to consolidate thousands of small claims, and in doing so come up with a total liability that Sony has to pay for. A class action against Sony would cost them a nice chunck of change, "helping them manage their access" to consumers' computers. In other words, a class action, which will almost certainly be settled, is how hundreds of little guys get together to punish the big guy for infringing on their rights.
I don't think any other western democracy allows U.S.-style class actions, and that's because the class action fulfills a role in the U.S. that the government fills in other countries. Specifically, the class action allows private parties to regulate and enforce the laws via large monetary damages, e.g., environmental laws and consumer protection laws. In other countries, the national government would be more involved in enforcing these laws.
How hollow those words ring now, let me paraphrase in light of what Sony is accused of.
The unauthorised tampering with users computers is against the law. It infringes the legal rights of customers. And it's bad for music.
If there is one thing I'm sick of it's being preached to in this manner by corrupt, self serving sleazy corporate fat cats.