The Sony Controversy and Digital Rights Management Legal Issues: Nothing New

I was going through our law firm archives this weekend looking through our previous consumer protection litigation regarding Digital Rights Management ("DRM") techniques used on music CDs and I realized something quite interesting - the same issues found in our lawsuit against Sunncomm from over four years ago (September 2001) are found regarding some of Sony's music CDs this year. Here is a copy of the Sunncomm lawsuit we filed from four years ago ComplaintDRM-CD.pdf - just plug in Sony's alleged DRM abuses du jour like root kit alterations, lack of notices, privacy intrusions and some class action allegations (due to the passage of proposition 64) and the same complaint may be good to go. In the Sunncomm case the same substantive allegations were made. To Sony's credit I heard they may have stopped producing music CDs with the "root kit" DRM technology. Regardless of which side one takes in the Sony DRM issue it seems to me that nothing is new here and Sony should have learned from the past if for no other reason than to avoid alienating their own customers and stimulating consumer protection lawsuits.