Sony sued for nicking software
Servers seized in France
MAFIAA MEMBER Sony BMG, known for dragging college students and single mothers into federal court on accusations of music file sharing, has been sued by a small software company in France for allegedly using 'pirated' software.
A Sony BMG employee called upon software developer PointDev for assistance in using one of its products called Ideal Migration. When PointDev's technicians addressed the support request they found that the software had been activated with a stolen authorisation key.
PointDev got a search warrant for court bailiffs to raid a Sony BMG office in January. The raid discovered four Sony BMG servers containing unlicenced copies of PointDev's software, so the servers were seized as evidence.
PointDev apparently wants to make an example out of Sony BMG. "We are not interested in an amicable settlement. It is not just a question of money but more importantly in principle," said Agustoni Paul-Henry, CEO of PointDev.
When asked if he thought that the use of unlicenced software might have been merely the thoughtless act of a single Sony BMG employee, Paul-Henry disagreed. "I think piracy is linked to the policy of a company. If the employee has the necessary funding to buy the software they need, it will. If this is not the case, he will find alternative ways, as the work must be done in one way or another."
La Province has a lengthy report in French here, with a translation of it here.
Sony BMG is apparently so embarrassed that it reportedly told La Province not to report on the ongoing investigation. Well, its bluster obviously didn't work. µ
L'Inq
Zeropaid
Comments
EFF etc.
Any way EFF and some such got involved, helped sue living crap of them, which more importantly could get the issue to the kind of media read by government(s) types?Everybody else is doing it...
Here's a fun exercise:Extract wmpaud?.wav files (9 in all) from your retail Windows XP CD. Actually, you can find them in your Windows directory already, but it's more authentic from the CD. Open any of them in your favorite hex editor. Scroll to the end of the file. See "Deepz0ne"? Deepz0ne was (is?) a member of Radium, a well-known warez group (or it used to be, anyway. For all I know they all joined Al-Qa'ida years ago and got killed in Tora Bora). The string was attached to all files created by a copy of Sound Forge distributed by said group. The presence of this string on a CD distributed by Microsoft may or may not mean something...
chutzpah
they has itSony/BMG Possible Terrorists?
According to an article posted at dslreports.com (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/US-Attorney-General-Says-Piracy-Leads-to-Terrorism-93129)THe US Attorney General ='s Software piracy to terrorism. I think Sony/BMG are terrorists.
Hell look at how they attempted to infect and control every ones PC a few years ago with their own ROOTKIT.
-- Portion of the article --
United States Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave a short speech this week in Silicon Valley in which he equated piracy with terrorism. He spoke about the rise of IP crimes and the need for our country to protect ourselves from foreign threats by cracking down on these crimes.
as
this is a