The road to perdition

How Sony became an ugly sister

Since this is the time of the year for pantomime, how about one for a corporate audience? It's called Sony and the Rootkit and it's a true story. It tells of how a once-great electronics company fell in with bad company, did some stupid things, was found out by a plucky band of bloggers and now is being pursued through the US courts by some avenging lawyers.

The only thing lacking at the moment is a happy ending for Sony.

If you don't know the story have a read

And John Naughton sums up

There are two lessons for the corporate world from this saga. The first is that the days when you could get away with disreputable behaviour are ending. Bloggers are more difficult to muzzle than are mainstream media. They're also brighter, and more technically knowledgeable, than most journalists.

The second lesson was pointed out by Professor Ed Felten of Columbia. It is that putting copy-protection on music CDs inevitably leads to 'spyware' of the kind discovered by Russinovich. Why? Because the only way of stopping PC users from doing what they want with a CD is to install software on their computers that prevents it. Users don't want that software, so you have to install it surreptitiously. And they will want to remove it, so you must make that difficult too. The road to DRM is the road to perdition. Ask Sony.

We blogged about it here a few days ago

For the nay sayers I have only one point to make Communities do dominate brands

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