BoingBoing.net has an excellent Sony rootkit roundup, part II that is really worth reviewing if you’re interested in this case. Here are the opening lines:
Cory Doctorow: It’s been three days since the first roundup post on Sony’s rootkit DRM and lots of new stuff has come to light since. Below is a timeline of posts since then, but first, here’s the Sony debacle news that came in while I slept:
Just a quick followup on the Sony malware situation: they’ve now been spanked by both Microsoft and the Department of Homeland Security. I feel the warm glow of righteousness.
This evening I was pointed to a blog posting from yesterday about Sony’s foray into malware distribution. The author gives a heavily technical blow-by-blow account of uncovering sleazy copy-protection software that has come along with his latest purchase from the Sony BMG record label:
…At that point I knew conclusively that the rootkit and its associated files were related to the First 4 Internet DRM software Sony ships on its CDs. Not happy having underhanded and sloppily written software on my system I looked for a way to uninstall it. However, I didnt find any reference to it in the Control Panels Add or Remove Programs list, nor did I find any uninstall utility or directions on the CD or on First 4 Internets site. I checked the EULA and saw no mention of the fact that I was agreeing to have software put on my system that I couldn’t uninstall. Now I was mad.
Tim Lee has posted an excellent missive addressed to the record labels on the iTunes Music Store:
…every customer who buys your products from the iTunes Music Store becomes locked into Apple products. If that’s not changed, that will soon make Steve Jobs the most powerful man in your industry.
Fortunately, there’s an easy solution: when you renew your contract, you should demand that Apple remove the digital rights management (DRM) technology from the iTunes Music Store.
Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.
Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that “develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software” (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.
The innovative online music label Magnatune (which I mentioned once before) does things differently. They offer unrestricted streams of all their music (not just snippets), have a voluntary sliding price scale, and offer DRM-free downloads in multiple formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. It’s easy to love this as a consumer, but to many business analysts it sounds untenable. Today I came across an academic paper that validates the Magnatune model:
The paper analyzes the behavior of customers of the online music label Magnatune… We develop a model that is based on reciprocal theories of social preferences pioneered by Rabin (1993) and extended by Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004)… The predictions of our model are empirically tested with the field data we obtained.
Via the blog of old Well pal Bruce Umbaugh I learned of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new publication “The Customer Is Always Wrong: A User’s Guide to DRM in Online Music.” It does a great job of picking apart the breezy claims of several leading music services. People want to be freed from the hassle of DRM, and these services know it – that’s why they make the overblown statements that the EFF has so nicely debunked.