Music Industry Backlash Against Sony Rootkit

Foobar of Borg writes "The Associated Press describes how backlash from Sony's Rootkit CDs is causing problems for the music industry. The problem is two-fold: (1) the inherent technological problem of trying to prevent anyone from copying anything and (2) letting lawyers make technical decisions when (from the article) 'Lawyers don't have any better understanding of technology than a cow does algebra.'" More from the article: "'I think they've set back audio CD protection by years,' said Richard M. Smith, an Internet privacy and security consultant. 'Nobody will want to pull a Sony now.' Phil Leigh, analyst for Inside Digital Media, said the debacle shows just how reluctant the labels are to change their business model to reflect the distribution powers -- good and bad -- of the Internet. He believes that rather than adopting technological methods to try to stop unauthorized copying of music, record companies need to do more to remove the incentive for piracy."

Comments

Re:use the attention

[ozmanjusri]

On the other, Sony is being made a scapegoat for the relative complexity of maintaining a secure and clean system.

You're right that computers are poorly designed when it comes to maintainability, but Sony deserve all the bad karma they are getting. They have a long history of abusing the trust of their customers, including installing spyware as standard on their Vaio computers. http://www.winpatrol.com/db/freesample/tgcmd.html

Re:Remove incentive?

[Anonymous Coward]

They're unprotected MP3's.

My stuff about the Sony's rootkit

[muzzy]

I've written some pages about Sony's XCP DRM system.

Summary about the DRM, what it does, and what its problems are: http://hack.fi/~muzzy/sony-drm/info.html

You can also find my research and opinions about the issue linked from there. Please send mail if you have anything to add or any corrections to my content.