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The Sony BMG CD copy protection scandal concerns the copy protection measures included by Sony BMG on compact discs in 2005. Sony BMG included the Extended Copy Protection (XCP) and MediaMax CD-3 software on music CDs. XCP was put on 52 titles and MediaMax was put on 50 titles. This software was automatically installed on Windows desktop computers when customers tried to play the CDs. The software interferes with the normal way in which the Microsoft Windows operating system plays CDs by installing a rootkit which creates vulnerabilities for other malware to exploit. This was discovered and publicly revealed by Mark Russinovich on the Sysinternals blog. Other operating systems were not affected. As a result, a number of parties have filed lawsuits against Sony BMG; the company ended up recalling all the affected CDs; and greater public attention was drawn to the issue of commercially-backed spyware and rootkits. Additionally, further investigation revealed that Sony had created its copyright protection software, in part, using LAME code written by Jon Lech Johansen, violating the GNU Lesser General Public License. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia : Installation of machinery for general use (no tools) |
