the drm mess gets messier
The Sony BMG DRM situation just continues to get more and more messy.
To recap, a number of recent music CDs published by Sony BMG contained anti-copy software that was installed secretly on your Windows system – even if you just happened to be playing them. However it turned out that this software could protentially be hijacked by virus writers to behave like malware. Attempts to reveal or even remove the said software continue to prove nigh impossible, and after much protest, Sony reluctantly released details of how to break into this rootkit – in a bid to allow anti-virus companies to ensure that the security holes it opened will not be exploited in the near future.
The bigger issue at hand is what a record company has rights over when it sells you a product. The debate on one hand is that if you buy a CD (or any other published artistic work) surely you must have the right to use and distribute it for personal use within the confines of your own home? – Should a publisher be able to install to control how much or how little you are able to do this? On the other hand the publisher would argue that such tools protect their works from unauthorised copying and piracy.
But sometimes these measures are implemented too tightly – how many people have been shocked to find out that a recent CD purchase (let's not forget - that is has been legitimately bought) won’t play on a PC and so can't be copied or converted for use on their own MP3 player. As digital music has now hit the mass market, you can imagine the bemusement that many moderately technical users will face when they buy a CD, fire up their media-library software (e.g. iTunes) and wait and wait – and wonder why their CD ‘won’t work’. Cue many frustrated calls to the PC shop or their software vendor - who would themsleves observe the situation in an equally bemused fashion.
To take the opposing publisher’s line, this would have been quite a different isue if we were never told about this, but careful examination of their accompanying EULAs shows that they did – along with other surprising clauses as well (but everyone always reads these thoroughly of course! - summarised or complete. It just makes you wonder what other wildly restrictive EULAs we have clicked through in our hurry to install software is sitting on our systems.
So, they are in their EULA rights to do this, but it’s the overbearing and dismissive attitude that has managed to get people’s heckles up. It goes without saying that litigation of some sort of description is likely to follow.
This entry was posted
on Thursday, November 10, 2005 at 5:35 pm.
