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HOUSTON (Reuters) - Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott filed a civil lawsuit on Monday against Sony BMG Music Entertainment (6758.T) for hiding "spyware" software on its compact discs in a bid to thwart music copying.

According to the lawsuit filed in Travis County, several of the company's music compact discs require customers to download Sony's media players if they want to listen to the CDs on a computer.

Software included with that media player "remains hidden and active" after installation, the Attorney General's office said, and makes users vulnerable to security risks and possible identity theft.

Sony said on its Web site that it had recalled all CDs that were installed with its XCP technology designed to prevent illegal music copying, Abbott said, but Texas investigators were able to purchase several of the CDs at Austin retailers on Sunday.

(4 8 15 16 23 42:The Numbers Are Bad)

the show Lost has those numbers so every time I hear lost I think of 4 8 15 16 23 42.

To summarize, MediaMax software:

- Is installed onto the computer without meaningful notification or consent, and remains installed even if the license agreement is declined;
- Includes either no uninstall mechanism or an uninstaller that fails to completely remove the program like it claims;
- Sends information to SunnComm about the user’s activities contrary to SunnComm and Sony statements and without any option to disable the transmissions.

Matti Nikki (a.k.a. Muzzy) and Sebastian Porst have done great work unearthing evidence pointing to infringement. They claim that the code file ECDPlayerControl.ocx, which ships as part of XCP, contains code from several copyrighted programs, including LAME, id3lib, mpglib, mpg123, FAAC, and most amusingly, DVD-Jon’s DRMS.

These are all open source programs. And of course open source is not the same as public domain. Open source programs are distributed with license agreements. If you copy and redistribute such a program, you’re a copyright infringer, unless you’re complying with the terms of the program’s license. The licenses in question are the Free Software Foundation’s GPL for mpg123 and DRMS, and the LGPL for the other programs. The terms of the GPL would require the companies to distribute the source code of XCP, which they’re certainly not doing. The LGPL requires less, but it still requires the companies to distribute things such as the object code of the relevant module without the LGPL-protected code, which the companies are not doing. So if they’re shipping code from these libraries, they’re infringing copyrights.

Perhaps the scariest sentence any company exec can hear these days is that their company is being investigated by NY Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. While Sony may have initially brushed off the rootkit issue by saying that it didn't matter since no one knew what a rootkit was, it appears that Spitzer is now quite familiar with rootkits and that's probably not good news for the Sony BMG. Texas's Attorney General led the way by suing Sony BMG pretty quickly -- but Spitzer's reputation for coming down hard on companies that he believes have done something wrong can't be pleasant news for the record label that kept trying to tell everyone there was no problem at all.

There is no wrong, wrong is what could decrease their income; the rest, whatever it is, is acceptable.

When it comes to major companies, I get the feeling this is the ethics they all follow <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />.

Übereil

Consider also the schizophrenic nature of Sony. One unit sells music which they don't want consumers to duplicate. Another unit sells computers designed to duplicate music.

LaFille...

It probably isn't being widely reported because most newspapers have no clue what it's about, and don't want to look stupid by getting it wrong. If THEY understand what Sony has done wrong in the first place...

As a general rule, most journos are not really high tech experts.

Well, the basic case is not hard to understand, IMO; summarized: you play a CD from Sony on your computer, it installs things on your computer whithout your consent, things that damage your computer, and sends information about you to the company, again without your consent, and there is no proper way to remove it comletely (even more summarized: it installs hidden spywares you can't get rid of properly). Of course, how it does it and what are the exact laws is further than the average's reach but, again IMO, not essential to understand the issue...

RIAA lawsuit goes to court for the first time

Op-Ed Contributor

By DAMIAN KULASH Jr.
Published: December 6, 2005

Los Angeles

THE record company Sony BMG recently got in trouble after attempting to stem piracy by encoding its CD's with software meant to limit how many copies can be made of the discs. It turned out that the copy-protection software exposed consumers' computers to Internet viruses, forcing Sony BMG to recall the CD's.

This technological disaster aside, though, Sony BMG and the other major labels need to face reality: copy-protection software is bad for everyone, consumers, musicians and labels alike. It's much better to have copies of albums on lots of iPods, even if only half of them have been paid for, than to have a few CD's sitting on a shelf and not being played.

The Sony BMG debacle revealed the privacy issues and security risks tied to the spyware that many copy-protection programs install on users' computers. But even if these problems are solved, copy protection is guaranteed to fail because it's a house of cards. No matter how sophisticated the software, it takes only one person to break it, once, and the music is free to roam and multiply on the peer-to-peer file-trading networks.

Meanwhile, music lovers get pushed away. Tech-savvy fans won't go to the trouble of buying a strings-attached record when they can get a better version free. Less Net-knowledgeable fans (those who don't know the simple tricks to get around the copy-protection software or don't use peer-to-peer networks) are punished by discs that often won't load onto their MP3 players (the copy-protection programs are incompatible with Apple's iPods, for example) and sometimes won't even play in their computers.

Conscientious fans, who buy music legally because it's the right thing to do, just get insulted. They've made the choice not to steal their music, and the labels thank them by giving them an inferior product hampered by software that's at best a nuisance, and at worst a security threat.

As for musicians, we are left to wonder how many more people could be listening to our music if it weren't such a hassle, and how many more iPods might have our albums on them if our labels hadn't sabotaged our releases with cumbersome software.

The truth is that the more a record gets listened to, the more successful it is. This is not just our megalomania, it's Marketing 101: the more times a song gets played, the more of a chance it has to catch the ear of someone new. It doesn't do us much good if people buy our records and promptly shelve them; we need them to fall in love with our songs and listen to them over and over. A record that you can't transfer to your iPod is a record you're less likely to listen to, less likely to get obsessed with and less likely to tell your friends about.

Luckily, my band's recently released album, "Oh No," escaped copy control, but only narrowly. When our album came out, our label's parent company, EMI, was testing protective software and thought we were a good candidate for it. Record company executives reasoned that because we appeal to college students who have the high-bandwidth connections necessary for getting access to peer-to-peer networks, we're the kind of band that gets traded instead of bought.

That may be true, but we are also the sort of band that hasn't yet gotten the full attention of MTV and major commercial radio stations, so those college students are our only window onto the world. They are our best chance for success, and we desperately need them to be listening to us, talking about us, coming to our shows and yes, trading us.

To be clear, I certainly don't encourage people to pirate our music. I have poured my life into my band, and after two major label records, our accountants can tell you that we're not real rock stars yet. But before a million people can buy our record, a million people have to hear our music and like it enough to go looking for it. That won't happen without a lot of people playing us for their friends, which, in turn, won't happen without a fair amount of file sharing.

As it happened, for a variety of reasons, our label didn't put copy-protection software on our album. What a shame, though, that so many bands aren't as fortunate.

Damian Kulash Jr. is the lead singer for OK Go.

The Texas attorney general said on Wednesday that he added a new claim to a lawsuit charging Sony BMG Music Entertainment with violating the state's laws on deceptive trade practices by hiding "spyware" on its compact discs.


The new charges brought by Abbott contend that MediaMax software used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs violated state laws because it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement.

"We keep discovering additional methods Sony used to deceive Texas consumers who thought they were simply buying music," Abbott said in a statement.