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Just An Online Minute... What Goes Around...

After years of news reports about the record and entertainment industry suing file-sharers, the tables have finally been turned. In a richly ironic development, the same company that has so aggressively defended its intellectual property rights is being sued for interfering with its consumers'rights to property--their hard drives.

Monday, the state of Texas and Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the latest lawsuits against Sony BMG for its copy-protection technology. The suits join at least six other class actions recently filed against the company.

In an attempt to discourage music piracy, Sony recently started selling CDs that can't be copied more than a few times and, in some cases, remain hidden from users and potentially leave them vulnerable to hackers, while also transmitting information about users back to Sony. Some of the discs also contain programs that prevent their transfer to iPods--even though that's the only reason many consumers would put the discs in their computers in the first place.

And, in some cases, the programs allegedly installed themselves before users were shown an end-user license agreement--a practice any first-year law student could have told Sony was a very bad idea.

For sophisticated consumers--or at least those who are comfortable messing with their own hard drives--basic Google searches will yield instructions to defeat some of this technology. And Sony itself agreed to recall and replace millions of the copy-protected disks, in addition to providing uninstallers--though, according to the EFF's lawsuit, at least some of those uninstallers are themselves flawed.

But for people who have purchased these CDs and then been disappointed to learn they won't play in iPods, or have suffered hackers--thanks to the software installed by Sony--the company's attempt at a quick fix is too little, too late.

It's clear that Sony, like other entertainment industry companies--not to mention TV networks and book publishers--is perplexed by the fast-changing digital media world. (Just yesterday, Daily Variety reported that several TV executives were mulling a lawsuit over a new TiVo plan to let consumers download programs to the iPod and Sony's PlayStation Portable.) Understandably, entertainment companies fear doom if they can't find a way to control the distribution of their product. But if they don't come up with a more elegant solution than spyware, they'll be doomed anyway.

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