Blog: Pete Loshin: What Hath Sony Wrought?

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What Hath Sony Wrought?

The difference between comedy and tragedy is this: when it happens to someone else, it's comedy; when it happens to me, it's tragedy. It's ten years since I've been a music CD consumer, and Linux systems seem unaffected by Sony BMG Music Entertainment's digital rights management (DRM) rootkits, so to this Linux-using, radio-listening guy the whole drama is nothing but pure, unadulterated, high-concept comedy.

The storm, a series of incredible and increasingly outlandish revelations about Sony and their insidious machinations to assert Dr. Evil-style dominion over how their loyal customers use computers to listen to music, started on Halloween.

Read on for more hilarity.

Catch up on all things Sony DRM here on BoingBoing's overview/timeline page for the first two weeks of what I now call "The Sony Disaster: 2005"; here's BoingBoing's Part Two roundup picking up where the first timeline ended.

Of course there are open source hooks to this story, like the report, translated from Dutch, that Sony's rootkit incorporates open source software (LAME, an open source MP3 encoder) but violates the license. So much for respecting copyright protection.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) noted some of the outrageous clauses Sony in their rootkit EULA. It's bad enough that you must install a "small proprietary software program" on your PC; the first clause of the EULA specifies that you may only listen to the music on the CD using an "approved" media player. It does downhill from there, just read the EFF article.

The Register reports viruses taking advantage of the rootkits installed by Sony's CDs have been discovered in the wild.

It took a while, but Sony finally apologized after infecting over half a million computers, class action suits in California and New York (so far), and (according to Brian Krebs at the Washington Post), a scolding from the Department of Homeland Security.

Now, that's entertainment.

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