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Comment by viseztrance | Hacker News Reader

Honest question. Did the author even attempted to contact Sony or anyone in the KDE organization to resolve this issue?

Honest question: did Sony ever attempt to contact anyone before installing rootkits on their machines or suing them for copyright infringement through proxy? They didn't even contact me quickly when my PSN account with CC info and everything was compromised.

While it might be good style, contacting a copyright violator before making things public is not at all a must. Sony is not exactly known for communicating well, so it might not have been worth the effort.

Honest question. Does Sony do the same when someone accidentally uses their licensed material?

In lieu of blogging about it? Yeah, yeah they do.

Yeah, they stick to less serious steps such as lawsuits and rootkits instead of something this egregious.

Obviously not "less serious," although certainly more to the point. We can go with "less passive aggressive."

Not that I have a problem with this method, but it isn't usually done with the end goal of fixing the problem.

The usual corporate response is to send a letter telling the offender to stop.

Honest question: Who do you contact and what is the chance that it would be at all an effective approach? Are you basically asking the OP to bang their head against the wall dealing with "tier 1" customer support agents?

I'd be tempted to email their listed DMCA contact.

I think what the author did is the better solution.

Big corporations must learn that they can't treat their users badly but disrespect the laws themselves without getting into PR trouble.

Does it matter (legally)?

Sony being willing to install rootkits on people's PCs and being quite sue-happy over copyright infringement, then turning around and violating copyright and licensing terms matters in a social context. Sony needs to live up to their own standards (which I would prefer means they need to change their standards, but realistically means that they need to at least obey what they enforce).

Violating the GPL terms matters legally.

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