At this point, many who follow news in the Internet community know of Sony BMG’s desperate maneuvers and unethical tactics to protect their copyrighted material. The largest forces against Sony were bloggers. The bloggers waged an assault against Sony and now Sony has relented somewhat and recalled those CDs.
InformationWeek’s published a story on Wednesday discussing the impact bloggers had on Sony’s debacle. They point out that bloggers waged a massive assault against Sony before Sony agreed to handle the problem. They finally agreed to stop selling 50 CD titles with the XCP content protection software on it. They are also recalling all discs in stores and recalling those purchased.
As they pointed out, this really began in the blogosphere. Mark Russinovich discovered the problem and posted everything on his blog. F-Secure had also been following the problem and posted it on their blog. Then it quickly made it’s way through the blogosphere and before you know, Sony has a public relations nightmare on their hands.
InformationWeek quoted Fred von Lohmann, senior intellectual property attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “”It seems crystal clear that but for the citizen journalists, Sony never would have done anything about this. It’s plain to me that it was Sony’s intent to brush the story under the rug and forget about it.”
The EFF, as a cyber liberties advocacy group, is considering filing suit against Sony. It would be one in a list of suits pending for Sony over the rootkit row.
A number of individuals suggested this demonstrates the changing face of public relations and how blogger response is something that must be factored into business decisions as much as any other form of media.
John Stith is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
