Extended Copy Protection (XCP) is a software package developed by the British company First 4 Internet (F4I) and sold as a copy protection or digital rights management (DRM) scheme for compact discs (Wikipedia 2005). This software is designed to control the distribution (copying) of material on compact discs. One version of this software, ‘XCP-Aurora’, was used as a copy protection measure by Sony in 2005. This software was discretely included in many Sony music CD’s at that time. On the first occasion that a user attempted to play or copy music from a CD containing XCP, the software was automatically installed on the users system. It is noteworthy that this only applies to the Microsoft windows operating system; the software had no effect when used in conventional CD players or on computers running Linux or other operating systems. The key ethical point at this time is that this software was installed entirely without user knowledge or consent. Furthermore there was no way to safely remove the software from an affected CD, in fact some attempts could result in rendering CD drives inoperable due to registry settings adapted by the software on installation. The fact that the software was designed to be hidden and installed without consent has led to it widely being described as Spyware (the term Rootkit is used for reasons I will describe later).
In order to examine the ethics of this situation I believe that first one needs to examine why Sony used this software in the first place. In the past Sony have enjoyed a very generous share of the entertainment market. As new technologies have been developed and made available, this share has diminished. In particular Web based companies such as napster or ...