I have a big piece on IP going into Saturday’s Guardian. I’m not very happy about it, because I think it misses an important point about Sony’s rootkit, one of the most egregious examples of corporates taking ownership of things we consider our own, like the computers we have bought.
It is going to be a huge PR disaster for Sony, since the software opens one security hole, the removal kit another, even bigger one; and the whole thing turns out to be a violation of copyright itself, since it contains, in a delicious irony, portions of the (copyright protected) DVD-playing program that got the Norwegian teenager Jan Johansen pursued into court by the record industry.
But only this afternoon did I see the really important point. This wasn’t aimed at consumers at all. The particular target appears to have been Apple (some of the stolen GPL code was there to detect Apple software). They really did not want these songs ripped to iPods. The customers’ computers were merely the battlefield for these two unlovely corporations to fight their DRM wars on.
The “Apple targetted code” isn’t about Apple; it’s about F4I alledgedly ripping through a GPL project without a care and using any and all code from it. Chances are they didn’t even know they’d dragged it across with the rest of the code they were stealing.
Ah. It has to be said that there is one company which will find it hard to get work in future.
But I did read somewhere stuff which suggested they were particularly anxious to get Apple and the ipod.