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A Legal Analysis of the Sony BMG Rootkit Debacle
YIAAL writes "Two lawyers from the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology look at the Sony BMG Rootkit debacle: 'The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.' Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea. The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future."
Good old greed..
Just send Chuck Norris over there for crying out loud!
... of the morning, so I'll bite. I'll admit that I only got as far as reading the abstract, so sue me. I really don't see the need for a journal published paper to dissect the situation. Sony got caught up in the zeitgeist over Napster and how digital distribution was going to destroy their business model, just like how Hollywood freaked over the VCR. I think paranoia and utter indifference to the customer pretty much sums up the whole situation. Other than that, I don't see the need to dredge up a two-year old incident with a published paper, other than it's pretty late.
I got a catholic block.
This shouldn't be about laws, its a moral issue.
Laws don't and should not be the only guiding factor in the actions of people or corporations. It is not the case that anything specifically prevented by law is allowed. A person or corporation should also be a good citizen, and there are things you just should not do, such as inflict root kits on other people's computers.
The question then is; how did somebody at Sony arrive at the conclusion that they should try to protect their IP right in this manner?
Waas this a comittee decision where moral judgement went out the window in a corporate meeting? Or are people at Sony severely lacking personal moral judgement?
I would like to know.
A quote from Lessig's Free Culture:
Legal norms are not just about judicial precedent.
Of course this would be a non-issue if Windows didn't automatically run software when you put a CD in the drive; this is just another reason why auto-run is an insanely bad idea.
Can we please get an Icon that has a foot and a handgun?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.' Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea. The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future." ...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems... ...demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures... ... flawed protection measures... ... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law... ...is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea...
...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
...the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems... ...demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.
... then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures... ... flawed protection measures... ... contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law... ...is whatever the hell Sony's legal department says it is. And we have many, many millions of dollars, euro, UK pounds, or yen to prove it. Without the cash, talk is trash.
... Yes, under 'even the most charitable interpretation' it was a lousy idea...
...
That's pretty simple. They thought that there was a vast network of 13-year-old superhackers that were going to destroy the company by sharing files of music recordings. Then some schmuck (names? anyone who knows?) in the firmware special projects department told some marketing manager that he knew how to keep 13-year-old superhackers from copying music from CDs by simply adding a little piece of code.
The only security and privacy that they care about is their own. These concepts don't exist for people who are not executives in the company. Especially customers.
"Since we own the music on the disk that is placed into a computer CD drive, we, by the simple and obvious extension of corporate logic, thereby own the computer and all of the data inside it." If you want to become a corporate executive, you need to start thinking like one.
If it keeps ordinary people from copying stupid pop songs from our CDs, then it is not flawed. If it destroys or corrupts the data on user's PC, we don't care. Serves them right as they are supposed to only be listening to CDs on a real Sony CD player. After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
Next year's rootkit software will work. And the first thing that it will do is send your name and address to our lawyer's office who will prepare a standardized form charging you with theft of intellectual property (which is some illiterate junkie thug under Sony corporate contract moaning 'baby, baby, baby' over and over). Our bot software will then serve this to anyone who puts a Sony music CD into any device with internet access (unless, of course, the device is a $999 Sony model DRM-XKE CD player with hi-def 2-inch LCD screen and wireless internet access). After all, we invented the CD so we can set the terms on its use.
suggests some changes to the DMCA
The only changes that our legal department will allow the US politicians to pass will be ones that increase the criminal penalties for possession of music. This will happen when Sony completes its corporate merger with Wackenhut and CCA and completes the vast network of corporate prisons being built in distant lands. These will be needed to hold the vast number of unemployed former American college students who not only illegally listened to music, but also fell behind on their student loan payments.
Unfortunately, due to scaling problems, any sufficiently large and diverse corporation will have components that exhibit behavior that are detrimental to other components, or even the whole. While this can be reduced and discouraged, I do not believe it can be completely solved - something will always manage to slip its way through the cracks.
Sony has a huge image problem (especially among the geek elite) due to this effect, and due to the fact that its goals do not seem to align with the geeks of Slashdot's dream of free content for all. Maybe better laws, regulation, and consumer awareness will provide the sticks and carrots necessary to help guide this behavior to constructive not destructive purposes. If that happens, I'd suggest investing heavily in porcine aviation stocks, however.
"The article also suggests some changes to the DMCA to protect consumers from this sort of intrusive, and security-undermining, technique in the future."
How about this, when an industry pushes legislative half assed measures and gets them passed in to law, they forfeit normal protections afforded every other group out there.
In this case DMCA law prohibits the consumer from doing all sorts of things, in an effort to protect a particular industry. Since Sony installed, without permission, software that effectively broke computers, they'd held to a HIGHER standard than any other organization.
In this case the law should have revoked the corporate charter surrendered all assets to the government. Since the Corporation is a "legal" entity, the same as a person, the government should treat it exactly like a person caught doing the same thing.
My $.02
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Here's a link:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/default.mspx
The specific one you want is TweakUI for your OS.
Why is a legal solution needed? Clearly, the whole incident worked out very badly for Sony-BMG. Any company can see this example and determine that this kind of software should not be used.
I don't hit my hand with a hammer, even though no law that restrains me from doing it. Is there a role for government in keeping folks from hitting their hand with a hammer?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Why do we provide for corporations what we do not guarantee for ourselves? If we who starve and suffer must earn our keep, why can't a corporation thrive or fail without government intervention?
Glad to see
I"M not
the only one who
forgetsto hit the "Preview" button!
Just -1, Troll talking to another.
and despite the debacle, people still want Blue Ray to win the Hi-def war.
I know Sony acted like a jackass, but it was more ignorance than malice. They didn't write the rootkit, they bought it from somebody else. And if they knew what a rootkit was, the people who wrote it didn't tell Sony it was a rootkit, and likely did not consider it to be a rootkit. They advertise the software as preventing users from making copies, and I'm guessing Sony considered the software on that criterion alone.
Much like the average sysadmin doesn't consider the privacy implications of leaving a backup tape in a car, the average music exec doesn't consider the privacy implications of some piece of copy protection software.
My point is that Sony didn't know what they were doing, nor were they competant enough to realize that they didn't know what they were doing.
dom
But I am more pissed at Microsoft.
This is NOT supposed to happen - I would allow them a foulup of this magnitude only on the virgin release of WIN95.
Let's face it, neither people nor businesses are unconditionally honest. I believe the proper lawyerspeak for "dishonesty" is "realistic".
People will violate copyright and patent if they feel they can get away with it.
Business will write loans that nobody can pay, will insert phrases like "we reserve the right to make any change at any time to this contract" in their written contracts, and sucker customers will sign it anyway.
Both pranker/hackers and businessmen *will* write hostile code.
I am not nearly so mad at Sony for doing this as I am at Microsoft for having code that lacks resilence against such attacks. Even as much as simple integrity checking of core files would isolate tampering of those files.
This could be as easy as when the customer boots from his purchased legit installation CD and asks it directly to verify his OS. There is no way any hacker could compromise the code on a stamped CD. At least the computer owner would know his computer is telling him the truth over which processes and threads are running, and know the registry keys are being honestly reported.
How a business claims "trustworthy computing" and such a thing happens makes me think of the banking industry repackaging all those toxic loans, then having some ratings agency stamp them with a high rating, then sell it all off to corporate pension managers - with every party in the whole sorry chain shielded by "hold harmless" law from the repercussions of their negligence.
All this "plays for sure" businesstalk rings of Circuit City Divx. Its marketing headhock which the technically illiterate ( even if they are business savvy; ) falls for over and over again. I realize a business appears to have much lower needs of system security than I feel is prudent - hence their acceptance of stuff that requires other companies products to crutch it up before it works. It seems to me that despite all the hoopla, we still have basically lousy stuff that hasn't seen any improvement since WIN98.
Linux seems to be the answer, as I know had this exploit been used on Linux, there would have immediately been free and open discussion of what happened and how to make damn sure it doesn't happen again. I can not count on that kind of support on proprietary systems, whose support is whatever the vendor sees fit to support - with any other help facing legal liability for even trying to help.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The rootkit was put on those CDs by Sony/BMG, which is a separate entity that is 50/50 owned by Sony and Bertelsmann (BMG stands for Bertelsmann Music Group). Furthermore, the people at the top, who make all of the important decisions are all from the BMG side. So, if either company is more to blame, it is Bertelsmann. Does this mean you should boycott Bertelsmann? It does seem a bit silly to boycott Random House (major book publisher and Bertelsmann subsidiary) over what happened to some music CDs, and yet that is what some are doing w.r.t. Sony Vaio, Sony cameras, etc. My suggestion would be to boycott the product that Sony/BMG puts out-their music CDs.
Is it just me or is Sony losing it? It seems that Sony has been making a lot of really bad mistakes and it is heading freefall. On the way to becoming a shadow of the former self?
Onda Technology Institute
Islam certainly teaches a system of morality. Whether it is the one you want taught is another matter.
http://humanists.net/alisina/islamic_morality.htm
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Read my post again. The bit about "prism of religion". In fact Islam and the Evangelicals was exactly what I meant there. Sigh...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If they added an autorun that worked in a restricted mode it wouldn't be to bad. Perhaps a simple hyper linked document type of application, something very specific and limited. As all I seem to recall autorun being good for is launch menus for games to run/install.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
I wasn't responding to your post, I replied to this one
;-)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=390868&cid=21723276
I don't disagree with this post
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=390868&cid=21723180
In fact I'm sure Mr. Rasczak would explain the morality of dealing with alien enemies of the State, especially ones that are numerous but low tech and and rely on suicide attacks and indiscriminately targetting civillians
"Some say US foreign policy has encouraged militancy in the Middle East and a live and let live policy would have been preferable"
"I'm from New York and I say KILL EM ALL!"
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Not just because of the conclusions ("Part III examines potential market-based rationales that influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy.") but also because of the rant-free and very lucid and illuminating analysis of the factors involved.
To me, the best part was: "After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures in Part IV, we examine law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, in Part V. We argue that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict such harms on the public.".
Those who have hopes for political action to amend the current crop of laws may be interested to read: "Finally in Part VI, we present two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, we suggest that Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and anti trafficking provisions in order to enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, we offer promising ways to leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers."
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
"Even today, one of the qualifications that many people IN THE USA look for in their elected leaders is previous military service."
The US has a weird, hyper-patriotic society that a lot of Europeans find bizarre, brainwashing and militaristic.
And only giving the franchise to people who have previously served in the military? Screw you! What gives you the right to decide that? What gives those citizens the right to decide how everyone else gets to live? Nothing whatsoever.
Sorry, pinning it on BMG dosen't work. This is vintage Sony, and their contempt for their customer. In this country Sony DVD players were the only ones that wern't reliably region free (big deal if you want discs from other regions, which are legal and sold openly). Or then there's the noxious DRM on Minidisc - can't pull a digital copy of something you recorded onto your PC even if you own it, they lied and said minidisc played MP3 when it transcoded instead, the are a key bankroller of the RIAA's standover extortion from kids and grandmothers, they took DRM to a whole new level with Bluray, and of course there's ARCOSS. If you want to go back even further, goofle the underhand way they used misinformation to kill off the Dreamcast.
Sony is the vermin of the consumer electronics industry. You should boycott them not just to make a stand, but because the products they peddle are often no better than the alternatives - they just cost more and always seem to have hidden strings attached. They are underhand, arrogant, dishonest people. Why woould you give them your hard earned money?
Moron.
Sony products are everywhere. I saw lines of people taking away sony tvs when they were on offer at a supermarket in the UK the other day.
PS3 outsells xBox 360 in the EU.
It's currently outselling the Wii in Japan.
They aren't going anywhere.
Ugh... The movie... Puke...
It has nothing to do with the original message from the novel. The novel had a number of very powerful messages regarding social structure, moral, etc. These are all absent from the film. And in the novel the enemy was anything but low tech.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Pigs will be ice skating in hell before that happens...
No sig today...
The way I see it, my computer is my property much like my house is also my property. They both have "doors" to the outside world, but that doesn't mean that anyone can just walk in and have a beer. I guess my favorite analogy is buying a new TV. What if you went out and bought a new TV that had a hidden camera in it, but you didn't know about the hidden camera, and it was broadcasting a signal to anyone who wanted to watch. Would you keep the TV? Would you litigate against the company that made the TV? The camera in the TV is much like the Rootkit in a CD/DVD/etc...They are both there "To make sure you aren't breaking any laws" but they are also massive invasions of privacy into a place that they entered without permission. It would be clear cut if it was a hardware camera, why is it different because it is a software camera?
Heh, reminds me of a sign I saw in a Wal-Mart. "Buying tobacco for minors: It's not just wrong, it's illegal." As if being wrong isn't a good enough reason not to do it?
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Of all the Big Four, it's definitely the easiest to make an argument against purchasing Sony music.
You can tell music consumers about all the obnoxious legal tactics that the Big Four does, and they just don't 'get it'.
However, if you mention that a company puts out audio discs that can potentially F--- up your computer, I think that does sink in.
(Just don't go too deeply into rootkits. I find it's tricky to explain to people who aren't computer-savvy.)
Does even one cent of those profits go to anyone at Sony in Japan?
If so, boycott Sony AND BMG.
I have, and everyone who asks me for my geek advice on purchasing any tech equipment will be, too.
(I just helped one of my best friends set up his home theater/HDTV at his condo last weekend, which was purchased with my input.
Panasonic home theater sound system, and Samsung HDTV - no Sony to speak of. His game console will be a Wii, too, when he gets his tax rebate.)
By the way, that Boycott_BMG account looks pretty new - you don't work for Sony, do you?
One of my favourite examples of "transformative" fair use ever.
Whilst my above post is off topic, I'm not sure I see how it's a troll, I'm merely continuing the discussion and answering the points raised by the parent post. It's not even a particularly inflammatory post.
Of course, I guess "troll" will do because there is no "-1 anti-american" and I appear to have touched a nerve with this one.
We live in a time when you CPU provides all the power you need to shield processes from each other and your hardware, and we still have to be afraid of what might happen when we run an application? We should be bloody ashamed of ourselves.
Except that it parodies the novel, something Heinlein fans have trouble admitting.
The novel had a number of very powerful messages regarding social structure
Have you read this by any chance
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_its_Enemies
I doubt Popper would classify the society portrayed in Starship Troopers open, it seems like a modern version of Sparta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#State_organization Not all inhabitants of the Spartan state were considered to be citizens (part of Demos). Only the ones that had followed the military training, called the agoge, were eligible. However, usually the only people eligible to receive the agoge were Spartiates, or people who could trace their ancestry to the original inhabitants of the city although there were two exceptions. Trophimoi or "foster sons" were foreign students invited to study. Xenophon sent his two sons to Sparta for their education as trophimoi. The other exception was that sons of helots could be enrolled as syntrophoi if a Spartiate formally adopted him and paid his way. If a syntrophoi did exceptionally well in training he might be sponsored to become a Spartiate himself.
Others in the state were the perioeci, who can be described as civilians, and helots who were the state owned serfs that made up 90 percent of the population. Due to the fact that descendants of non-Spartan citizens were not able to follow the agoge, and Spartans could lose their citizenship if they couldn't afford to pay the expenses of the agoge, the actual number of the Spartan citizens was constantly reduced, known as oliganthropia. Or maybe Plato's Republic with Heinlein as a Philospher King.
It's the rise of militarised, highly unequal societies like this that lead to the dark ages and everything valuable we have today including science and democracy comes from Athens, not Sparta. So it's not completely unfair that Verhoeven parodied Heinlein's ideas as fascist.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Anyone know how these rootkits work with virtual PCs?
No, really, read the paper before you mod me off-topic — page 1180 (24th of PDF):
I swear, I'd be hard pressed to come up with anything this surreal even if I tried.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Linux does not, and cannot, prevent this kind of attack. That you think it could shows you have a profound lack of understanding of what the attack was. (Here's a hint -- where do you think the word "rootkit" came from? Duh?)
There is, of course, exactly one difference: On Windows, AutoRun is the default, and entirely specified by the CD. On Linux, AutoRun barely exists at all, and where it does, it's entirely controlled by the OS -- it never runs a program off the CD, if anything, it launches a media player to play the CD. However, you can easily configure Windows to behave this way.
In fact, as a software engineer, I cannot think of a way that you could prevent an attack like this without also locking down the machine so hard you might not even be able to install Linux, and certainly, Windows would be a lot less friendly to work with. Vista is an example of what happens when this is tried.
Can you think of a way this could possibly work?
Let's look at your suggestion:
Actually, yes, yes there is. All it would take is a buffer overrun or any other, similar exploit while it was "verifying" that OS, and the CD would be worthless.
Also, how do you propose that CD tell the difference between a compromised OS and an upgraded OS? How about the difference between a compromised OS and a deliberately customized OS?
Oh, we can already check registry keys -- there are Linux boot CDs for that. But here's a question: Do you actually understand the purpose of every single process and registry key on your system? I know I don't.
It would really only make a difference once you knew, specifically, what to look for. And once you do, it doesn't really matter, because whoever discovered it would certainly have a recipe for removing it -- a recipe that either wouldn't require a truthful listing of processes and registry keys, or would include a means to discover such a listing.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The entire reason you need the software to play this music is because when you first inserted the CD, it installed itself and made sure of that.
So if you had autorun/autoplay completely disabled, you could run, say, Windows CD Player, and play it without running any software off the disc.
Or you could boot Linux and just play it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Short note to the person with mod points -
- CAREFULLY read the post that you are considering moderating.
- ALWAYS take ALL of your medication as prescribed
- READ the Slashdot FAQ again.
- DO NOT taunt happy fun ball.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"At best they get a version which was skewed and slanted through the prism of their family religion."
All morals have a religious foundation. What you are talking about is ethics.
I am very afraid that most people don't get any religious instruction at home. Most of the people I know at work don't take their kids to church.
We have a have a world where parents are letting children figure out sex, ethics, morals, and religion for themselves. Just not a good idea.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
inane
Function:
adjective
Inflected Form(s):
inaner; inanest
Etymology:
Latin inanis
1 : empty, insubstantial 2 : lacking significance, meaning, or point : silly
synonyms see insipid
-- inanely adverb
-- inaneness noun
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
It is a felony. From where I sit, it looks to me like someone at Sony should be doing ten years in the slammer. Or perhaps (since it is a "person") Sony itself should be given the Corporate Death Penalty.
fwiw
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
So, Europe gets a referendum on the EU Constitution.
It is soundly defeated.
Then the EU renames the Constitution the Lisbon Treaty and the governments go ahead and sign it WITHOUT asking the people.
This is especially touchy in the UK where they we promised a referendum on the Constitution.
All this while in Brussels (the capital of the EU) they are debating whether or not to split Belgium into two separate countries because they can't form a government.
Screw you! What gives you the right to decide that? What gives those citizens the right to decide how everyone else gets to live? Nothing whatsoever.
You don't have a democracy in Europe or even a Republic.
You have a pseudo-aristocracy.
But instead of power passed by birth it is passed by some Mandarin-like academy system. You traded Aristocracy for Bureaucracy.
You have a long way to go before you can even THINK about criticizing the US of democratic principles.
As the tag says--"bullshit, it's a felony". When the fuck are we going to see everyone involved in this project DRAGGED AWAY IN HANDCUFFS? As I've said before, if a preteen was caught installing rootkits on thousands of computers without their owners' consent, he would certainly be dragged away in handcuffs even if he was just messing around, even if money wasn't involved at all.
If you care about freedom and justice in this country, don't sit around idly talking about class action lawsuits. Instead, find a copy of a rootkit'ed CD (buy it from eBay if you must), put it in the drive of your XP box to verify that it does its thing, then take it to your local law enforcement office (preferably FBI) and report the crime. If enough people do this, they just might take it seriously. They JUST MIGHT hold a multinational corporation to the same standards of justice as a preteen kid.
As to the Sony/BMG rootkit incident, as long as the punishment for getting caught in bad corporate behavior is acceptable, expect to see such behavior repeated.
The penalty need not be administered by law. There are any number of expressions of social outrage that can have bearing on corporate behaviour.
Unfortunatly, most people wave their fist, swear, then bend over and grab their ankles again.
Whilst the reintroduction of the constitution IS very dodgy, the fact that the PM has signed it doesn't make it law. He doesn't have that kind of power. It is a declaration of intent. It now has to go through our houses of parliament and be ratified by the democratic rules of each counry.
So you have a long way before you can THINK about having a sensible argument on these matters. You clearly have no idea how the EU works.
I hate to be succinct here but...STOP buying anything SONY...Hit them in their pocketbook and let them know you are going to stop buying their products. Letters have more of an impact but e-mails can work as well.
I'm saying that I do already contribute to society. Not that it makes me special, but to say people don't contribute whilst looking away from the fact that the fruits of a whole third of my labour go directly into society's coffers is wrong.
I effectively do community service for a third or more of my working time already.