Sony BMG one of the Big Four music companies and one of the most fervent supporters of the antipiracy efforts of the RIAA and IFPI in their effort to stop piracy of movies\music, is now it's being sued for software piracy.
This all started with a support call by a Sony BMG IT staff member to a French software company. PointDev, is the maker of Windows administration tools including Ideal Migration. The Sony BMG employee supplied a pirated license code for Ideal Migration while on a call to their support center. PointDev was able to mandate a seizure of Sony BMG's assets. A subsequent raid of Sony BMG revealed that the software was illegally installed on four servers. This led to a lawsuit by PointDev which it is claiming over $475,000 in damages against Sony BMG.
This alone does not seem to be signs of larger scale piracy at Sony BMG but if you talk to the Business Software Alliance (BSA) they believe that up to 47% of all software installed on Sony BMG's computers could be pirated. The BSA is a trade group established to represent a number of the largest software makers in trying to stop software piracy. In the recent year they have focused their effort on audits of company to find pirated software running on their computers. They even offer a bounty for information of companies that run pirated software.
What makes this case so ironic is the fact that Sony BMG is so fervent in fighting piracy when it comes to the movie and music industry. One the best example of this is the Sony RootKit. Sony BMG included the software on about 100 music CDs. This software was automatically installed on to desktop computers when customers tried to play the CDs. This was done without alerting the user that this software was being installed. The software interfered with the way the operating system plays CDs, prevent any media player or ripper software from accessing the music tracks. The software had a second affect, it opened security holes that allowed viruses to in, and caused other problems. This was all done to stop piracy.
I hope the irony of this entire case is not lost on the lawyers for Sony BMG.
