Human Rights

While the Pirate Bay case we wrote about is still in process let’s take a look at some ways of protecting digital rights. The two main examples here will be the actions of Sony Corporation, but at first some general things about Digital Rights Management. The various types of the digital rights management defense failed. Not because they were weak, but because it was very limiting for the owner of the protected files. You can move the files to another computer, but without a short online confirmation of license you can’t play it. You also can’t listen to the DRM protected music on your mp3 player. Compared to a license CD, this type of copyright protection makes the product basically unusable.

Sony BMG made a really desperate and aggressive attempt to protect its products and that triggered multiple lawsuits and a large scandal in 2005. In 2000 Sony switched to a new aggressive strategy of Digital Rights Protection, the actual effects of this strategy were discovered in only five years after. On October 31, 2005 Mark Russinovich, a famous software engineer posted a message on his blog. He discovered a spyware program that was installed when you launched a Sony BMG license CD, the software was used to monitor the activity of your PC. These spyware programs were installed without any warning or any warning label on the box. It was not only a violation of privacy and human rights; the software also made numerous holes in the security of a computer and led to system crashes. Russinovich is one of the biggest Windows gurus in the world, so he was able to find the spyware in the system processes and determine where it came from and how it was installed. For a normal PC user it would be impossible. Sony recalled the spyware products and presented cleaning software on its websites. Still there multiple lawsuits were filled in the U.S. but this wasn’t the worst consequence of this case. The worst thing was that thousands of customers lost their trust to the Corporation. When you buy a licensed product you don’t expect to become a target of digital rights protection software or have your PC monitored by the label. Such things actually show how far the corporations would go in a desperate attempt to protect their incomes.

A more recent example of copyright protection can be found on the largest Russian torrent server – torrents.ru. The copyright laws in Russia are very weak so major companies like Sony have found another solution. A representative of the company is registered on the forum and monitors the activity. As soon as someone starts sharing some new video game or movie the representative contacts the administrators of the site and they remove it. In this case Sony is mainly protecting things like games for various Sony Play Station consoles. Old files remain untouched, so in this case it is some kind of a democratic solution.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Human Rights. 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.