Now that that the dust is well and truly settled on the DRM rootkit fiasco, Sony is suing the company who made the XCP software which was at the center of this controversy. The suit accuses the company (now called Amergence), of negligence, unfair business practices and breaching the terms of its license agreement.

While I can’t comment on the terms of their license agreement, I find “negligence” and “unfair business practices” to be stretching things a bit. What exactly were they negligent of? Did they fail to keep abreast of the fine line between being malware and merely annoying? Regardless of what side of the DRM/piracy argument you find yourself on, DRM software effectively exists to limit people’s access to or use of files on the CD or computer. It seems that they succeeded admirably in that regard. I’m not even going to touch the question of unfair business practices, as that gets too far into the question of whether DRM is a fair business practice to begin with.

That being said, the thing that really sets this apart from other DRM methods was that it installed files to the local machine, whether you agreed to installation or not. Was this an oversight or intentional, in order to keep files inaccessible while the EULA screen was displayed? I’ll be interested to see if they’re able to prove this one way or the other.

I guess the moral of the story is that more companies than just those directly related to software should be paying attention to the definitions of “Potentially Unwanted Technologies”.