Sony may be hoist by own petard on copyright

SONY MIGHT HAVE DONE the world more good than bad with its DRM rootkitting high jinx over the last few weeks.

Without regurgitating it again, there is one element that has not received nearly enough attention, the allegation that Sony infringed copyright. Since that initial claim, the code has been pored over, and more bits and pieces have emerged, leaving the community salivating.

For the sake of this story, we will assume that Sony may have infringed on the copyright as accused, but that may or may not be true. If it is not true, there is little point to any of this, so let's just pretend it did something really bad for the sake of argument.

Sony as you well know is a card carrying member of the RIAA, an organisation that stands up to the letter of the law on copyrights, and is known for suing anyone who crosses them, from 12 year olds in welfare funded families to octogenarians. It is the epitome of all things it believes to be right and profitable for its members. In fact, it loves to wave damages of several thousand dollars per alleged copyright infringement. Good for them I say, it sets one hell of a precedent.

That is where the nightmare begins. If Sony did indeed distribute millions, some say tens of millions of copies of someone else's copyrighted material, that is bad. The fact that it sold those copies for a profit surely puts it into a whole other class of 'wrongness' than mere distribution, right? At the very least, this has got to be behaviour at least as infringing as distribution over a P2P network.

So, what is a company to do? It sets a precedent of a few thousand dollars per 'wrong', and now it has millions of Lexan disks of wrong on the books, and an auditable paper trail. This, if you use their own numbers could add up to billions of dollars owed to the Lame crew and the others alleged to have their virtual toes stepped on.

So, this is where the community can step up to the plate and end this silliness once and for all. If the allegations against Sony are true, it has set precedent after precedent that it owes a lot of people billions. If those people are smart, they can ask Sony to decide exactly the worth of each copyright infringement, and pay up that much.

Ask for a written, court approved document stating that a single infringement is worth X dollars per infringement. If Sony wants to set that number at $1 per copy, that's fine, write out a cheque for seven or eight figures and be done with it. The problem is, it has just cut the legs out from any future RIAA enforcement efforts.

If Sony wants to take the proverbial RIAA hard line, I am sure the Lame crew would love a few billion dollars. If you use the numbers that Sony likes to bandy about, around $150K per infringement, you have a settlement worth more than the entire Sony Corporation. Lame-Sony has a certain ring to it, don't you think?

Of course, this all depends on whether it's all true or not. Merciless time will tell. µ