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November 18, 2005

Sony: Weirder and Weirder

Before the move to Sweden, I envisioned my kid embracing age-old Swedish traditions. I saw her in the woods, picking berries or mushrooms. In summer I imaged her splashing in the Baltic Sea while, in winter months, she'd skate across frozen lakes. Yeah, right.

The global sway of American pop culture had completely escaped my notice before the move. These days I get frequent reminders of it. The one this morning arrived in the form of earnest 11-year-olds swaying on stage while mumbling the lyrics to "Wake Me Up When September Ends" under the considerably more energetic direction of the spiky-haired music teacher at our elementary school. (You haven't lived until you've heard class 5A sing "twenty years has gone so fast.") I like Green Day too but jeez, whatever happened to "Du Gamla, Du Fria"?

Luckily Sweden isn't so Americanized yet that corporate execs here could secretly collect information from customer computers without expecting a jail sentence. Sony's probably big enough to survive this debacle (including lawsuits and more nasty PR) but what about First4Internet, the British company that provided both the flawed copy-protection software and the flawed uninstaller? To the glee of many, it appears that some of the free code used by First4Internet in the digital-rights management software it developed for Sony was used in a way that violated the terms of its copyright. As The Register put it, "The irony of a company using code from someone who circumvented DRM to develop an even nastier form of DRM - without even saying 'Thanks!' - will surely feature in geek trivia quizzes for years to come."

Confused yet? I have been so Andrew Kantor's column in USA Today is a gift of clarity about the degree of evil Sony has wrought. I understood that Sony's DRM format caused a security problem. But not the all-important fact that Sony's patch for "removing" the original software also created a security problem--among other failings. As Kantor explains:

"In order to get the patch, you have to provide your name, e-mail address, and other personal information to Sony. When you finally download the thing, it does the patch thing, and then it installs all sorts of new stuff that Sony doesn't tell you about. And it continues to send your listening habits to Sony and its partners, but now it has a bunch of your personal information too. But wait. Incredibly, there's more. The patch itself, it turns out, opens another big security hole."

Talk about criminal cluelessness. Sony first produced CDs that 1. secretly installed software on your computer, 2. secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to, 3. created a security hole in your PC and finally, 4. damaged the operating system if anyone tried to remove it. Sony's considered response to the outrage provoked by this news was first to deny there was a problem, then to demand lots of personal information before giving you a software fix that 1. secretly installed software on your computer that secretly sent Sony information about the songs you listened to and 2. created another, larger security hole in your PC.

No wonder I couldn't keep the story straight. It's pure Hollywood. And while it may be Sony's biggest screwup, it's not the company only screwup. "Sony's general incompetence when it comes to digital music boggles the mind," notes David Pogue. "First there was its 'iPod killer' music players, which were initially released without the ability to play a little file format called MP3. Then there was its disastrous Connect music store, whose design was so wasteful of screen space it was almost unuseable. And now the astonishing move to copy-protect all of its music CD's--ironically, in some cases, over the strident objections of the actual bands--with software that behaves like spyware."

As David points out, angry consumers aired their complaints in public forums like Amazon reviews, where they vowed not to buy affected CDs. Information Week went to town with this headline: Bloggers Break Sony. "There's a whole new set of rules that people have to live by," Factiva CMO Alan Scott told Information Week (Factiva just happens to make text-mining software to help execs track the gossip about their companies). "Whether it's blogs or user groups or NGOs, it's all about honesty and authenticity. This is just the latest painful example of a major company finding that the old tools and the old actions don't work."

Those old tools and old actions, also known as lies and lying, do work often enough. Just not this time. And as much as we'd all like to see these go away, I'm confident that in certain circles dissembling will always be in style. Even now I bet there's a bunch of executives nationwide using Sony's situation as a case study in crisis PR when it should be a case study in ethics. Sony's actions were wrong before they became public knowledge and they're wrong now. Too bad the company hasn't figured that out.

Posted by Deborah Branscum at November 18, 2005 12:44 PM

Comments

Posted by: joe at November 18, 2005 04:34 PM

Posted by: Deborah Branscum at November 19, 2005 10:47 PM