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Sony: Why care about rootkits?

Tags:
DRM

Published: 09 Nov 2005 18:10 GMT

A senior SonyBMG executive has hit back at the criticism surrounding the company's use of a digital rights management (DRM) technology on a music CD.

Thomas Hesse, the president of SonyBMG's global digital business division, said in a radio interview last week that its use of rootkits is not an issue to the everyday user."Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" he said in the interview with radio company NPR.

The copy-restriction software is hidden so that music pirates cannot find and remove it, according to Hesse. "This is purely about restricting the ability to burn MP3 files in an unprotected manner," he said.

Although Sony does not appear to understand why people are concerned about the use of rootkits, the EMI Group has tried to distance itself from the controversy by stating that it does not use rootkits on its own products.

"EMI is not using any software that hides traces of the program. There is no 'rootkit' behaviour and there are no processes left running in the background," an EMI spokesman said last week