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Sony Snafu Brings

DRM to the Fore Sun leads the charge with multiple open digital rights management projects

By Alex Handy

January 1, 2006 — (Page 1 of 3)
The debate over digital rights management came to a head in November, thanks to a failed attempt by Sony BMG Music Entertainment to prevent the piracy of the works of several of its recording artists. Now, both the entertainment industry and the software industry are up in arms over just what went wrong, and are seeking ways to stop another DRM debacle.

Sony’s music division had installed the Extended Copy Protection (XCP) package from British company First 4 Internet onto a number of its audio discs during the summer and early autumn of 2005, including the latest releases from Celine Dion, Ricky Martin and Neil Diamond. The XCP DRM package is designed to prevent users from ripping the CD’s audio tracks into MP3 format, and to stop the songs from entering a user’s iTunes library.

Unfortunately, the XCP software is not exactly subtle in its methodology. The software hides all processes beginning with “$sys$,” a bit of obfuscation that was, within a fortnight, exploited by virus writers to hide their own trojans on Windows systems. Sony subsequently recalled its discs, though its newer DRM-enabled releases are now said to also be capable of molesting non-Windows systems.

Sony Baloney
As if this weren’t bad enough, bloggers around the Internet began dissecting the XCP DRM software, and soon discovered that it ran home to Sony’s headquarters with surreptitiously captured information on its users. Others looking at the code also accused Sony and First 4 Internet of infringing on the Lesser GPL by using code from an open-source MP3 encoding tool.

During November, half a million computers around the world were infected with Sony’s DRM software, and security researchers were publishing reports and infection maps that frightened businesses, governments and even the U.S. Department of Justice. The state of Texas went so far as to sue Sony in late November, claiming it secretly embedded CDs with spyware. By the end of the month, even the Pentagon had been infected by the so-called Sony DRM spyware.

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