Virusmaker Sony gets a break

I wrote about Sony infecting numerous computers by selling CD's that had deliberatly been infected with malware (a rootkit) to protect the CD's against copying here.

To recap, Sony put a rootkit on about 40 CD titles that infected your PC as soon as you tried to play the disc in it. The infection hid itself from the user and made the computer vulnerable to outside attacks.

To make things worse, it later turned out that the bundled player on the discs contained GPL code that was stolen from a free project.

So, what kind of punishment do you expect Sony got?

According to a businessweek article here, Sony will be forced to pay 1.5 million dollars in damages to those harmed by their actions.

That amounts to 25 to 175$ per customer in each of the states in the US where the verdict is held up.

Now, 1.5 million dollars may sound like a lot, but consider an alternate scenario. What would happen to a cracker who got access to the production plant where CD's where pressed and inserted a virus for his own purposes like sending spam. Would he get of without any criminal sentence? Would he be let go for a small portion of the money he made with his criminal activities?

I think not, and I do not understand nor support why Sony goes free.

Breaking in to private computers and turning them to your own purpose is a criminal offence and should be prosecuted like that. I don't care if someone takes control of my computer to protect his music or to send spam, neither action is one I wanted my computer to perform.

I still maintain that the only fair course of action is to track down the persons up the hierarchy at Sony who ordered these criminal acts and to prosecute them in the same way any virus writer that got caught would be prosecuted and to make Sony pay for every last cent of the cleanup costs for the problem they created.

I know it's a dream, but it would be the right thing to do. Until that happens, I maintain that the content mafia is above the law, and the music labels with the RIAA are looking like a criminal gang more and more every day.