The rootkit of all evil?

Found on BBC News on Saturday, 05 November 2005
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Sony BMG, the record company part of the multinational corporation that makes laptops, TVs, movies and many other things, is in trouble this week thanks to a copy protection scheme it has used on a number of its CDs.

It is one of many competing techniques used by record companies to try to stop people making copies of music files from CD as they fear that their customers will then make the music available online without permission.

If you have got a Mac or a Linux box then you can play and even copy you disc happily, because the real WAV files that a CD player uses are there on the disc.

Fortunately, it is possible to avoid buying discs like this. Philips, who defined the CD standard and then made it widely available, has been very clear that these music delivery systems do not count as Compact Discs and cannot use the CD logo.

Microsoft has told technology companies that if they want to develop system-level software that lets Vista play movies then they have to get the approval of at least three of the major studios before it will be included in Windows.

I suspect that Sony would be very interested indeed in a version of Windows that controlled music playback without the need for any extra software from them.

And of course once there is a "technological protection mechanism" in place then it is against the law - both in Europe and the US - to get round it, so open source players for Linux platforms will be illegal.

So far, those "copy protection solutions" have never stopped the content of the CDs from going online. Every try was a successful failure, which only annoyed consumers, and never the "pirates". It's like a genocide which only kills your people, because your enemies are somewhere else. I'm not looking forward to a law which forces people to use Windows because it does what the entertainment industry wants. Somehow I doubt that such a law will become reality, simply because of the sheer amount of non-Windows users.