Management and the Technology Professional – B302

Case study answer 1

PLAN
There were multiple reasons why Sony wanted to protect their media, they include:
- Making sure people did not share there data with implementation of DRM.
- Making sure others did not profit at the record labels expense

However there are also reasons why Sony was innocent and what we (First4Internet) did was wrong. These included:
- not being able to remove the rootkit unless you reinstalled your operating system
- causing criminal damage to the legitimate consumers computers
- misleading our consumers to install software that would make it harder to remove to the average user.

ANSWER
The biggest reason why we (First4Internet) should not even have begun to think about doing what we did is due to the law. Sony employed us to make software to prevent customers making copies of the media by implementing some form of data rights management (drm). We managed to meet there requirements by implementing a rootkit that damaged Sony customer’s computers. What we did was go beyond this. We primarily broke the Computer Misuse Act 1990 sections 1 and 3 by modifying sectors of our customer’s hardrives and Sony were fault too for knowing this before it became public knowledge. The EULA states that the software should have been remove able and the rootkit installed prevented this.

Even with the software created, we passed our software over to Sony and they allowed mass production with their media to take place. What should have happened was for their software department to test our software and check that they were happy with the software usage, install and uninstall. Had this of happened then the issue of the rootkit may have been discovered at an earlier stage.

Sony is a large company that would have their own lawyers, auditors a compliance department and so on should have checked everything with these various departments whether they took the right approach or not. The media is only one part of this. The other is the contract with us and the work we carried out. If Sony were unhappy with any stage of the software development, the software could have been modified to work differently. Later on they lost out by recalling cd’s and reimbursing the customers and the bad reputation gained. We lost some reputation, time and money and had to co-ordinate making a patch to move the rootkit.

We at First4Internet have to hold our hands up (more so than Sony) for multiple reasons. Making a rootkit was the wrong way to go about the drm issue. As a result we broke worldwide legislation. We should have made a clear plan for this project, making sure we had ours and Sony’s compliance team, auditors, lawyers and so on accepting the project plan and definitions. With export laws we should have made sure that exporting software did not break any country wide laws. We and Sony should also have made sure that we did not break any computer laws, codes of conduct, EULA agreements and ethics.