Sony copy protection illegally used copyrighted code.

The copy protection software included on many new Sony albums doesn’t only do nasty things to your computer that make it more likely to crash and more vulnerable to security problems. Sony actually makes illegal use of free, open source code.

The funny part: some of the copyrights belong to DVD Jon, the guy who first cracked DVD encryption.

Code licensed under the GPL is copyrighted, but it’s free for everyone to use, provided they make their own code public. If you don’t comply with those terms (and Sony didn’t) then it’s straight-up copyright infringement. This isn’t “sharing music with a friend” infringement. This is more like “burning a few million Playstation games and selling them in Walmart and Best Buy” infringement. Sony packaged and sold pirated software on a few million of their CDs.

If Sony were a college kid or a single mom, they’d be in big trouble.