Ed Foster of GRIPELOG writes:

You’re probably getting tired of hearing about Sony BMG’s rootkit DRM [not me!], but one central mystery about it remains to be solved. What was Sony’s real motive for what many consider behavior that is awfully close to a criminal act? To answer that question I think we’re going to need to borrow a page from the criminal profilers by tracking the company’s behavior. Fortunately, we have more than one crime scene to help us with our profile, because it so happens that Sony has been employing more than one form of spywarish DRM in recent months.

Even after finally confessing, under considerable duress, that the rootkit was probably a mistake, Sony officials have stuck to the story that their use of First4Internet’s XCP DRM was intended only to protect their CDs from music pirates. But that alibi doesn’t really wash, since the XCP copy protection only punishes legitimate customers while doing nothing to stop file sharers. What’s more, this is a pattern of behavior we saw before with Sony when readers were complaining back in July about another form of DRM it was using on music CDs from SunnComm, Inc.

What clues can we pick up by comparing the different DRM approaches Sony has employed on its CDs in recent months? Fortunately, on the subject of SunnComm’s MediaMax DRM, we have the equivalent of a forensic anthropologist who can serve as an expert witness here. Princeton University computer scientist J. Alex Halderman is the researcher who SunnComm threatened with charges of violating the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions a few years ago when he revealed how their technology could be thwarted by holding down the shift key. The rootkit brouhaha prompted Halderman to take a look at how the MediaMax DRM is implemented on recent Sony CDs (all apparently on different titles than the CDs that have the XCP rootkit), and his published findings are quite intriguing.

[Continue reading Sony's DRM Profile]

[tags]spyware,drm,rootkit,digital rights management,sony bmg,class action lawsuit,first4internet,sunncomm,mediamax,xcp,sony-bmg,j. alex halderman[/tags]