Sony BMG‘s decision to implement a copyright-protection plan without telling anybody is shaping up to be one of the costliest decisions that the company has ever made.
Earlier this month, a computer-security researcher publicly revealed that some of Sony BMG’s CDs secretly install a program known as a “rootkit,” which is difficult to detect or remove from a computer and which can act as a back door for a malicious programmer to take remote control of a computer. Just to make matters worse, researchers shortly thereafter identified at least two viruses that were designed to take advantage of holes created by the code for the rootkit. Scrambling to respond to the developing disaster, Sony BMG last week announced that it was recalling and replacing the 4.7 million discs containing the program and that it stopped using the controversial software.

Yesterday, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott hammered the reeling music company with a civil complaint over the software that the company included on 52 of its recently released recordings. The lawsuit filed in Travis County (Austin) District Court alleges that Sony BMG’s XCP software violates Texas’ recently enacted antispyware law, the Consumer Protection Against Computer Spyware Act. Mr. Abbott called Sony BMG’s software — the purpose of which is to make it harder to copy compact discs — “a direct violation, almost word for word,” of the antispyware law, which provides for penalties of $100,000 per violation, or each computer on which a Sony BMG CD installed its software. The Chronicle article on the lawsuit is here, and Chronicle technology expert Dwight Silverman comments on Sony BMB’s bungle and the resulting Texas lawsuit here.
Finally, just to put a punctuation mark on Sony BMG’s very bad day, a third lawsuit seeking class-action status of claims relating to the copy-protection software was filed yesterday in Los Angeles.
Again, who made that decision to include that software on those CD’s? ;^)