Sony Invented It, Could Paranoia Kill It?
by Paul McGoldrick
The story goes that when the then founder/CEO of Sony Corporation, Akio Morita, was shown the plans for the audio compact disc (CD) player, he dismissed the original designs and told the product team to only come back to him when the complete Ninth Symphony of Beethoven -- typically running between 71 and 75 minutes -- could be stored on one CD. They achieved that with small architecture changes that were consistently followed with the later DVD standards.
So, while Sony -- with friends to help the launch and amazing success of the product -- invented the CD are they also going to be the ones to destroy it?
Hollywood is, of course, paranoid about copying and pirating of its products. We have said before in these pages that their attitude to the marketplace is simply out of date, and that they created many of their own problems by gouging and expecting distribution systems to be something that will never change. They have even taken on innocents, like DVD-Jon in Norway, probably because neither the executives or the lawyers understand the technology behind their products.
We have now entered a new era of paranoia.
For a little while some of the studios have been offering products that allow CD buyers to make back-up copies of the product they purchased. In Sony's case three back-up copies are allowable and the software that is on the CD prevents copies being made of the back-ups themselves. Sounds honorable: Sony is allowing back-ups in case the original product becomes unplayable, perhaps with scratches. But the plot is much thicker than that.
Mark Russinovich, of Sysinternals, is a man that we should be grateful is not a professional hacker. If he was there would probably be little data in the world that could be considered safe. He does great things for the PC industry by producing free software that can root out nasties that have buried themselves in your machine. Indeed he is one of the few names you can trust to not actually be in the business of actually infecting your computer while pretending to be the cure for your problems. A few days ago he ran a test on one of his own systems and found rootkits that certainly shouldn't have been there.
His blog is lengthy but it boils down to the fact that he found the origin was the Sony system software that permits three back-up copies only, and that it is actually a type of spyware from a piracy protection company in the UK called First 4 Internet. Their "Essential Tool System" product is supposed to be an anti-piracy protection system but it deliberately cloaks itself in your machine to monitor what you are doing.
It transpires that Sony and some other studios have licensed this product as a Digital Rights Management (DRM) protection software system. That fact is touted on the relevant products but the intrusiveness of how it works is not.
Sony BMG has always been very clear about its concerns over the privacy rights of its customers. Consider an example from the company's web site:
"Your privacy is important to us. That is why we want you to be informed about how we protect the privacy of visitors to our site. Please take a moment to read the following policy, which describes our practices for the collection and use of personally identifiable information on the [Sony BMG].net site. Sites that are linked to our site may have different policies; please review the privacy policy notices on those sites for details.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you on this site without your knowledge, and all such information is collected directly from you."
Certainly spyware is "collected directly from you" but "without your knowledge" is even clearer!
It could well be that the bosses at Sony simply do not understand the
technology that they have unleashed on themselves. Once this story is generally
known they should expect their CD sales to fall, rapidly. They could even
have killed their own format through their paranoia.