Tuesday, November 15, 2005

More DRM: Sony Caught in -- Gasp -- IP Theft

Someone in the Netherlands did a decompile on the XCP rootkit that has gotten most of the attention lately. It seems that parts of the rootkit use the LAME mp3 encoder, which is licensed under the Lesser GPL. That means by delivering only an executable (the rootkit) without source or crediting, XCP violates the GPL. Violating the GPL puts Sony at massive legal risk for—wait for it—copyright infringement.

The irony is just crushing.

Sir Howard Stringer (Sony's head) now faces a massive business problem, and his company's future in electronic media may well hang in the balance. He runs the risk of alienating not just the music customers, but the Playstation gamers as well.

Why? Ignoring the PR fallout from the rootkit, Sony just got a patent on a method of restricting game software to one copy on one particular machine. They seem to think that this kind of lockdown will be tolerated by its customers. Someone sell these guys a clue.

3 comments:

  1. I LUV irony! Great post Peter

    ReplyDelete
  2. Obviously, the snake has more than one head.

    Jack

    ReplyDelete
  3. I have my cluestick ready. Thanks Peter.

    ReplyDelete

All comments are moderated.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.