Tuesday, November 01, 2005

Time to Boycott Sony?

It's been clear for a while that content owners are willing to go to some fairly extreme lengths to protect their content from copying (fair or otherwise), but this article illustrates how far they're willing to go, and how much they respect you and your rights in the process.

In case you didn't read the article, or it all looks like techno-babble to you, let me break it down: If you play a new Sony audio CD in your computer, it will install a virus on it.

That's right, a virus. The article doesn't call it one, but it meets criteria of a "Trojan Horse" virus: It installs itself without any action on your part, it does not announce its presence, it takes active measures to prevent its removal, and it impairs the functionality of your computer. The big difference is that this wasn't written by some angry teenager in his basement, but by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

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