Hackers Nab Unreleased Michael Jackson Tracks From Sony

wiredmikey writes "Sony once again has found itself in the news surrounding another hacking-related incident. This time around, the breach doesn't appear to involve any lost user data or customer accounts, but instead, some valuable property owned by the record company. Today, several British news outlets have reported that more than 50,000 music tracks have been illegally accessed and downloaded by hackers, including a large number from the late Michael Jackson. Sony bought the catalog from Jackson's estate for $250 million in 2010, giving the company distribution rights to the unreleased music. The attack reportedly occurred shortly after details of the massive PlayStation Network breach last April, but details were only revealed this past weekend."

Comments

why?

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not every system you have needs to be connected to the Internet. Why in the world was such valuable digital property on a system that had ANY connection to the Internet, thorough NAT or otherwise?

I'm sorry... it just doesn't make sense. It's like all the talk of the vulnerable power grid... just don't put those items on the open internet. Or better yet... don't network them at all and have a human attend it in a secure place.

Re:why?

[Lennie]

It might have started with just a desktop with a browser you know. After one system gets compromised it might be possible to get deeper in the corporate networks of Sony.

Even the Nuclear facilities in Iran were not connected the Internet (it did have an air gap) but the Stuxnet virus still got in.

Re:why?

[AvitarX]

It's fucking music tracks they were not releasing to cash in at a later point.

This was going to be available at some point in the future, and it's better for society that it's available now. Locked up in a vault they had zero value.

Re:why?

[poetmatt]

Yep, this actually highlights some really supreme losses to society by virtue of the Jackson estate hoarding the shit out of Michael's music and Sony too.

Were it not for this we'd see Jackson remixes for the next 100 years if Sony had their way. Good on the hackers to get that stuff out there instead into society where *society* can benefit.

Talk about greed vs culture.

Re:why?

[jesseck]

I agree with you that there security is beyond poor, but land-locking the entire system as a solution to me doesn't seem like the best course of action.

I guess it depends on how valuable the item is- if RIAA were to be counting, what was stolen was trillions of dollars. A thumbdrive and a dedicated admin to administer the landlocked system is a fraction of the value in that case.

Of course, in the real world, Sony knew the music was not worth trillions, and that is why it was connected to the Internet.

Re:why?

[Richard_at_work]

I'm sorry, is "society" really entitled to everything a person created, ever? Even if they themselves never published it to the world?

My opinion is that, no, society isn't entitled to everything - a person is quite entitled to not release something and its no loss at all to society at large, because it never influenced it in the first place.

Re:why?

[betterunixthanunix]

Wow what a pain that would be to administer such a landlocked system

If you paid $250 million for the data stored on that system, and you know that there are lots of people who would love to download that data without your permission, would you really think that the administrative work is too much? That should have been one of the highest security systems Sony owned, and it should not have been connected to the Internet.

What do they do when they want to access the file to mix it, or to distribute, publish the new song

None of those require an Internet connection. You can connect the computers involved in mixing to a private network, where you can control who has access to the network and you can monitor the network as a whole, and then you can transfer the files. Likewise with machines that publish the music on physical media. Publishing electronically will be harder, but for the money they paid for that data, it seems like a reasonable effort.

What do they do when they get a new artist signed and it's time to add a song to the collection

Not store it on the same system as the collection that can never be updated, and that once leaked loses a lot of value. This sounds like a pretty typical MLS problem.

Re:why?

[MightyYar]

While I don't condone the theft, your comment is striking in how it highlights the way copyright has gone astray. Some of Micheal's music has been in copyright for close to 40 years already. And yet for a lucid, rational person for yourself, it seems reasonable to put forward that his kids need another shot of royalties so that they will have a "legacy". Now, I have nothing against providing your children (especially young children) with a bundle of cash to get them through early life and their educations - hell, maybe even a nice starter-mansion and first Rolls-Royce... but all of that could have been done through saving his money, investments, and life insurance... they sure don't need society to grant them welfare payments just because their dad(?) was a good singer.

Copyright is supposed to be about convincing artists to produce their creative works. It's supposed to be about making it a reasonable career choice to become a singer, painter, artist, etc. Why? So that we, as a society, get more creative output. It is not about making sons-of-good-singers rich. When the artist you are providing an incentive to dies, the incentive should die as well. At the very least, it should die within the number of years that a typical corporation plans for. If I'm being generous, Sony might have a 10-year plan.

As for the pizza parlor and the UPS man, this is beginning to sound an awful lot like the broken window fallacy to me. I have a sneaking suspicion that UPS could ship works based upon Michael Jackson's songs that fell into public domain just as well as they ship his 20-30 year-old stuff.

Re:why?

[Isaac Remuant]

Ohhhhhh, so that's where Clouds come from. I get it now.

Re:why?

[Toze]

because it never influenced it in the first place.

Except that Michael Jackson was influenced by Little Richard, James Brown, and Diana Ross. And Michelangelo lifted Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise for the posing of the Sistine Chapel. And every artist ever is influenced tremendously by all the artists that preceded them, and no art is created ex nihilo. The arguments for not releasing an artist's work (ie copyright) are never that the artist doesn't owe anything to society, but that the artist needs to make a living, or to ensure that their children are provided for.

In other words, yes, society really is entitled to everything a person creates, ever, even if they never published it, because that person appropriated the majority of their work from society in the first place. Our societies have, in the last 400 years, been willing to trade some of what we're owed in free speech in order to provide monetary reward to the artists, but we're still owed that speech. Disney didn't invent Cinderella, Dan Brown didn't invent the Catholic church, Dan Bull didn't invent either rapping or Skyrim (nor did Bioware invent fantasy adventure or videogames, nor did Tolkien invent magic rings or elves, etc.., etc., etc.).

Smooth

[Anonymous Coward]

Some smooth criminals!

Re:Smooth

[TheCarp]

Sony are you ok? Are you ok Sony?

Good marketing

[asdbffg]

Really. This will get some good buzz going in advance of Sony formally releasing the tracks.

Re:Good marketing

[DarkOx]

I certainly how those were the only copies and the hackers deleted them. If there is one thing Sony does not need its more money, and if there is one thing I don't want to have to suffer hearing on the play list of every pub, is more of that man's terrible music.

Including a large number from Michael Jackson

[Barbara, not Barbie]

including a large number from the late Michael Jackson

And nothing of value was lost ...

Where's the music?

[Dan East]

So where is this music? Why hasn't it spread far and wide over the net? I suspect the hackers are holding onto it in an attempt to blackmail Sony for a big chunk of cash.

Re:Where's the music?

[ZombieBraintrust]

Hackers likely didn't know what they had. They grabbed a ton of data and used software to sift through it for passwords, credit cards and email addresses. Going through all the music and finding the songs that were unrealeased would take plenty of ears or a music matching database. That is why Sony waited a full year before talking about this.

Bad

[langelgjm]

Really, really bad.

In further news ...

[Barbara, not Barbie]

Reporter: "So you're saying that these are unreleased tracks that were made before Michael Jacksons' death?"
Sony: "No, no - these are tracks from the LATE Michael Jackson!"
Reporter: "You mean, this is stuff from AFTER he died?"
Sony: "Exactly! This is music he created after death."
Reporter: "That's didiculous! How can he write music if he's dead?"
Sony: "He's de-composing, duh!"
Sony: "It's all in the contract. When you sign with us, we really do own your soul!"

distribution rights :)

[ciderbrew]

Sony, distribution is not a right. Well it's not now anyway.

Re:I wonder

[ZeroSumHappiness]

No. They can now just conflate crackers, hackers AND pirates and get even stricter laws into enforcement. This isn't a security problem on their end of course. This is because we're too soft on those dirty music downloaders.

Truly baffling

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok. So 50,000 tracks got downloaded.

Let's say for sake of argument, and since this was from their digital archive according to news radio this morning, that each of these tracks were in format of uncompressed audio. Would they really keep tracks as AAC, MP3, or MPA in their digital archive? I'm gonna be generous here and say each track was 25MB. That's roughly, 125GB of data to be downloaded. That isn't something you do overnight. That's something that takes days if not weeks, and possibly a month. Massive net security failure here, or what?

You have an obviously massive amount of money invested in that archive, and yet you don't protect it with approriate network security? I have to wonder how much their yearly network security expenditure was to protect that investment. $10,000? Clearly, they still haven't gotten the message that network security is important, even after the PSN lashing.

As little as I want to sympathize with Sony and it's continual targetting by subverts of the net, I just can't. They're a multi-Billion dollar a year company who have been in business for DECADES! How are you still in business with blunders like this?!?!? How the hell can you go around dropping hundreds of Millions on music catalogues and not protect your investment?

On a personal note, I wrote off Sony in 2000 when I bought my last TV whose components shorted at half their estimated life-time. I'm just truly baffled that a company this large, and with such massive influence and monies, can't take its online presence seriously.

Support your artists

[GodfatherofSoul]

If you don't want to more and more corporate-produced, demographically-designed artists, start buying your damned CDs from the people you like instead of downloading it for free and complaining about how crappy music is nowadays. I'm not even a huge music fan, but I make a point to buy CDs when I hear something I like.

Tiny violins?

[mindcandy]

filetype:torrent "tiny violins"

Re: $50,000 Tracks

[TaoPhoenix]

Wait a minute, the Spin Doctor got here and led us right where he wants us.

So the real story is that Sony lost security on 50,000 tracks and the title became "Michael Jackson tracks copied"?! Really? They had to pick one of only about 10 Flamebait artists?

Re:But did data get out?

[Dog-Cow]

All my servers are landlocked. Unless the data center gets flooded.