Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2007
Abstract
Late in 2005, Sony BMG released millions of Compact Discs containing digital rights management technologies that threatened the security of its customers' computers and the integrity of the information infrastructure more broadly. This Article aims to identify the market, technological, and legal factors that appear to have led a presumably rational actor toward a strategy that in retrospect appears obviously and fundamentally misguided.
The Article first addresses the market-based rationales that likely influenced Sony BMG's deployment of these DRM systems and reveals that even the most charitable interpretation of Sony BMG's internal strategizing demonstrates a failure to adequately value security and privacy. After taking stock of the then-existing technological environment that both encouraged and enabled the distribution of these protection measures, the Article examines law, the third vector of influence on Sony BMG's decision to release flawed protection measures into the wild, and argues that existing doctrine in the fields of contract, intellectual property, and consumer protection law fails to adequately counter the technological and market forces that allowed a self-interested actor to inflict these harms on the public.
The Article concludes with two recommendations aimed at reducing the likelihood of companies deploying protection measures with known security vulnerabilities in the consumer marketplace. First, Congress should alter the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by creating permanent exemptions from its anti-circumvention and antitrafficking provisions that enable security research and the dissemination of tools to remove harmful protection measures. Second, the Federal Trade Commission should leverage insights from the field of human computer interaction security (HCI-Sec) to develop a stronger framework for user control over the security and privacy aspects of computers.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Perzanowski, Aaron and Deirdre Mulligan. "The Magnificence of the Disaster: Reconstructing the Sony BMG Rootkit Incident." Berkeley Technology Law Journal 22, no. 3 (2007): 1157-1232. (Work published when author not on Michigan Law faculty.)
Comments
Work published when author not on University of Michigan Faculty. © 2007 Deirdre K. Mulligan and Aaron K. Perzanowski. The authors hereby permit the use of this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States license, the full terms of which are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/legalcode.