Protecting Intellectual Property by Stealing Intellectual Property

This is sweet. You may know that Sony is recalling hundreds of thousands of CDs that were secretly installing viral software (actually a "rootkit") on users' computers (some credit has been given to bloggers for highlighting the scandal). You probably know that this was a very ill-considered plan by Sony to protect its "intellectual property."

But it gets even better. This is the kind of irony one savors for its simple beauty: it looks like Sony copied--without acknowledgement--a number of lines in its rootkit executable code from LAME, an open-source music encoder. That's right: in order to protect their property, they stole someone else's:

If open source software is tightly integrated into a single executable program, the whole application has to become open source software, even open source software such as LAME whose MP3 encoder is licensed under the more relaxed Lesser General Public License (LGPL), a lawyer said.

"That's the flipside of open source: If you don't respect the open source rules, the old regime of copy protection comes back in full force," said attorney and Internet specialist Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm at law firm SOLV in the Netherlands.

Here's an open letter from LAME developers to Sony:

Several people pointed out that the DRM software used by Sony BMG and the media is talking about lately seems to contain at least parts of LAME, without complying with our license.

None of the LAME developers currently owns a CD with this rights crippling mechanism from Sony BMG and none of the developers is interested in buying one, so we aren't going to analyze this on our own, but we trust those people out there which analyzed it and found traces of LAME on such CD's.

Right now The LAME maintainers aren't interested in initiating a legal battle with Sony BMG. We live in a social competent world where we don't need to pull the weapons and are able to talk about what needs to be done to correct mistakes, right ? But we expect Sony BMG to take appropriate action and tell the public about those actions.

The LAME maintainers.