SonyBMG Music has
settled lawsuits brought by the states of Texas and California over its use
of CD copy protection technology in 2005. This is the second settlement of
litigation related to the so-called rootkit fiasco; the first, a
settlement of a
class-action civil suit, was approved several months ago.
The settlement of the Texas and California litigation involves fines and
agreements to reimburse consumers for discs and compensate them for damages to
their PCs. Beyond that, it appears to place restrictions on the copy
protection technologies that the music company will be allowed to use which go
beyond those stipulated in the class-action settlement.
The previous settlement essentially forbade SonyBMG from using any CD copy
protection technology from First4Internet, the UK-based vendor that supplied the
XCP technology that installed "rootkits" in users' PCs. (First4Internet
appears to have gone out of business.) It also barred SonyBMG from using
another copy protection technology, MediaMax from Phoenix-based SunnComm, but
the prohibition was apparently confined to the current version of MediaMax,
thereby allowing SunnComm to develop another version that the record company
could use. The class-action suit accused the SunnComm technology of, among
other things, violating users' privacy by transmitting information about music
usage over the Internet.
This new settlement calls for any CD copy protection technologies that
SonyBMG uses in the future to not be hidden on users' PCs. This is a
reasonable requirement, though it is yet another reason why CD copy protection
is a technology of little value. A technology that controls access to
content is of no use if it can be uninstalled from PCs, or if users can avoid
installing it in the first place. Making the technology be more "visible"
on PCs should only make it easier to uninstall.
Meanwhile, the third vendor of CD copy protection, Macrovision, has quietly
withdrawn its technology from the market after its one major US customer, EMI,
stopped using it.
The attorneys general in Texas and California touted SonyBMG's degree of
cooperation in stopping its use of these technologies. We continue to
believe that the root cause of this debacle lays somewhere between ill-informed
decision-making processes at SonyBMG and overpromises from the vendors. CD
copy protection for PCs, in any of its current forms, gives DRM a bad name.
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