(Cross posted to the OSDDDI blog.)
To protect its own intellectual property, Sony BMG appears to be blatantly infringing the copyright of others.
Undoubtedly, many of you have heard about the rootkit that is installed on Windows PCs upon inserting recent CDs from Sony BMG Entertainment record labels. This has become a veritable fiasco as this piece of spyware can be used to cloak all manner of things from viruses to cheating software. However, it now appears that the code written by the company that Sony BMG hired, First4 Internet, may actually infringe the LGPL by using code from the LAME mp3 encoding library (from "Spyware Sony seems to breach copyright"):
This software is licensed under the so called Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL). According to this license Sony must comply with a couple of demands. Amongst others, they have to indicate in a copyright notice that they make use of the software. The company must also deliver the source code to the open-source libraries or otherwise make these available. And finally, they must deliver or otherwise make available the in between form between source code and executable code, the so called objectfiles, with which others can make comparable software.
Sony complied with non of these demands, but delivered just an executable program. A computerexpert, whose name is known by the redaction, discovered that the cd "Get Right With The Man" by "Van Zant" contains strings from the library version.c of Lame. This can be conluded from the string: "http://www.mp3dev.org/", "0.90", "LAME3.95", "3.95", "3.95".
But the expert has more proof. For example, the executable program go.exe contains a so called array largetbl. This is a part used in the module tables.c of libmp3lame.
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