RIAA backs rootkits
Found on The Inquirer on Sunday, 20 November 2005
RIAA president Cary Sherman has backed Sony's use of spyware rootkits and claims that other companies do it all the time.
Sherman said that music corporations have the same right to protection as movie studios, video game makers, or software companies.
He said that there was nothing unusual about technology being used to protect intellectual property. He said that you can't make an extra copy of Windows or virtually any other software. Why should CDs be any different?
I'm not sure if I should laugh about this, or just pat him on the head. I'm not going to mention that virtually every software is available as a copy somewhere. You can't even say that those are just a handful of copies, when even MS changed it's policy and made SP2 available to legal and illegal users for the sake of security. Even if (repeat: if) his statement would be true: this doesn't give anybody the right to infect a computer and modify it to a degree so that the software cannot be seen or uninstalled. Not to mention the security holes and (Sony's) violation of copyrights.