More from Sony's DRM kerfuffle

Published on November 8, 2005 By IanTyger In Personal Computing

And the news about Sony's rootkit goes on. The Register has a piece on the use of Sony's DRM scheme to hide cheaters on World of Warcraft. And Mark Russinovich continues his reporting on this issue. Be sure to check out the (very clueless) response from "XCP Support", and the various responsed to that...

Wonder how Microsoft is going to respond to this...

Comments

Sembetu

on Nov 08, 2005

I think this is very ironic. Sony's DRM scheme was implemented by them as a measure to protect copyright, hence avert copyright "cheaters"... It is slightly humorous to me that this very same scheme would be used to aid cheaters. I don't really know what to make of it, other than the original DRM scheme was a bad idea, and now it has gotten worse. Once this starts to affect other companies, you are going to have companies pitted against eachother. My question is, though, how will this be litigated. Think about it: One company will be protesting another company's DRM scheme, because it violates their own copyright. So will they be arguing against one company's right to copyright protection to guard their own? It is very paradoxical, and I think it really brings the question of Intellectual Property Rights to a critical mass.

I do believe that companies and individuals have a right to copyrights, patents, and trademarks, but I also believe that open information has it's place in society. Particularly where information is concerned. I happen to believe that when you make your product available (depending on the product) to the public you can benefit from the public's usage and reporting on the product while at the same time creating demand. However, a company or individual should not be made to offer their products in an open state. I don't think the current laws (in this country in particular) provide enough of a structure for dealing with these kind of issues. I only hope that when this eventually gets sorted out that the consumer will not eventually lose. We will see.

Sembetu

IanTyger

on Nov 08, 2005

Note - I did mean to say microsoft in the second para; I know WoW is run by Blizzard, but I covered them in the first paragraph

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