I’m loving the fallout from Sony’s XCP copy protection software.

To boil it down, Sony has placed some software on its audio CDs. This software uses subversive methods to plant itself on your computer so that it can prevent you from making more than three backup copies of any XCP-protected CD. Lets state this plainly. Sony, without your consent, is installing software on your computers so that it can control how you use the music that you purchased.

In a step that I hope we see world-wide, an Italian digital rights organization has asked police to investigate. Other people are being arrested for writing and deploying code that acts in a similar malicious manner. Why is Sony special?

One extra thing I love about this whole PR explosion. It’s only an issue for Microsoft computers :). My PowerBook G4 is safe.

Des Paroz has a great summary of other acts by Sony on his blog. He states, “I will not buy Sony label music from any source other than iTunes.” I’m with you Des.

In all honesty, when Sony chose not to sign up with the Australian iTunes Music Store , I’d written them off. That simple act suggested that Sony does not care enough about its customers to offer them flexible methods in purchasing their music. So I choose not to buy there CDs–my only method of accessing their music for my iPod.

Tyme, over at The Microsoft Show, has a great brief podcast about the malware. Check it out to understand how it’s effecting your computer, and how you can check and fix it.

We’ll see how quickly Sony responds to this batch of bad PR. I doubt whatever they do will have a long term effect. They just don’t seem to understand their customers.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 9th, 2005 at 2:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.