SONY INFRINGED COPYRIGHT WITH COPYRIGHT PROTECTION SOFTWARE

Yep--good old DVD Jon (the guy who broke the original DVD encryption) has said on [http://nanocrew.net/|his blog], according to [http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/80271/sonys-drm-woes-expand-to-include-copyright-infringement.html|an article] at PCPro.co.uk, that his own code was found in the Digital Rights Management software that Sony has gotten in so much trouble with lately. Here's an excerpt from that article:

If Sony BMG was hoping that the controversy surrounding its copy-protected CDs was going to die away, it was reckoning without infamous hacker Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon.

It seems that the XCP software from UK company First4Internet that Sony had been using to prevent unauthorised copying of its music CDs, until it agreed to recall some 4.7 million discs, contains code 'infringing the copyright of several open source projects', Johansen notes in his blog. This includes code that he himself wrote for VLC, a free cross-platform media player.

The code was uncovered by Finnish software developer Matti Nikki, who also discovered other copyright violations.

'Multiple software components on the CD have references to the LAME open source MP3 code,' he wrote in an email. His findings have been substantiated by others.

'We can confirm that at least five functions in the XCP software are identical to functions in LAME,' Thomas Dullien from Sabre Security, a company that specialises in the analysis of complex software, told Reuters.

D'oh! Nice one, Sony!!

This reminds me of [http://thepete.com/orrin-hatch-the-distinguished-hypocrite-from-utah/|that time Orin Hatch wanted to pass a law that made it legal to automatically damage computers of users who had downloaded music]. The irony? Hatch was using copyrighted material on his very own website.

WELL DONE!!