Peter Griffin: Sony faces the music

There'll be plenty of heated conference calls taking place in the plush Madison Ave, New York, office of Thomas Hesse this week. The head of music label Sony BMG's digital business is fighting fires all over after introducing defective copyright-protection software on his company's CDs.

The music industry should have learned by now how unforgiving the public is when dodgy anti-piracy measures are forced on them.

We've had anti-copying encoding that could be erased with a felt-tip pen and protected disks that froze the drives of Apple Macs. Cracking other copy-protection measures has been just a quick search and software download away. The measures have done little to protect artists but have raised the hackles of music lovers already bitter at the prices of new releases.

Now Sony BMG has taken the prize for most badly executed anti-piracy measure in music history. When Hesse was in New Zealand in July, he told me about the company's plans to encode all future releases with anti-piracy software that would stop people from ripping multiple copies at will.

It sounded reasonable. A move to limit casual piracy that still allows owners of the albums to make a limited number of copies of them for their computer and music player.

Twenty albums have been released overseas with a flavour of the protective software called XCP (extended copy protection), but it has proved a potential timebomb for computer users.

Undetectable by your antivirus software and firewall, XCP hides on your computer and keeps track of the copies you make, preventing you from burning disks at will. There's a reason it's hard to find - so you can't track it down, delete it and get around the copy protection.

But the internet security industry claims its invisibility has allowed virus writers to design Trojans which can allow remote and unauthorised access to your computer and can go undetected.

Sony BMG is facing a class-action lawsuit over the debacle, with a New York attorney filing a federal case against the label and First4Internet, the company behind the software. It follows the filing of a lawsuit in California over the same issue.

The lawsuits aim to prevent Sony BMG from using the technology in future releases, although the company would be committing commercial suicide to do so anyway. It's pulled the two million or so XCP-enabled albums that haven't been sold and will replace the other two million copies that have been sold with new versions. But it is committed to copy protection in principle.

Hesse gave me a copy of country rock act Van Zant's Get Right with the Man, an album that features the nasty software. It's such a bad album that I didn't rip it to my computer. If I had, I could have opened up the exploit which, thankfully, is now being rooted out by Microsoft's free AntiSpyware programme.

There's an annoying process you have to go through in ripping Stand Up to your computer in Windows Media Player. But I haven't had any problems with those albums which use a different technology from a company called SunnComm.

However, there are now suggestions that that software has spyware traits as well. If it wasn't hard enough keeping our computers secure, now we've got multinationals booby-trapping them for us.