Punish Sony Under the DMCA

You regular readers know I'm not a huge fan of the DMCA, in as much as I think it's a draconian bit of law that should be wiped from the books. However, I am a huge fan of poetic justice, and I think our "pals" at Sony could use a bit of that right now. If the RIAA wants to hide behind the DMCA while suing the pants of it's customers, I think we, the people, should use the DMCA to put a hurtin' to Sony, as the kids say. Picked up from BoingBoing.net [Link]:

"Indications are that Sony has included the LAME music encoder, which is licensed under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which requires that those who use it attribute the original software and publish some of the code they write to use the library. Sony has done none of this."

Right then. According to the research that I have done on the DMCA, and the paper I did on it [Link], Sony could be punished under the DMCA and fined no more than $500,000 for the first offense and no more than $1,000,000 for each subsequent offense. (Criminal cases only, which this qualifies as.) Sony stated that slightly more than 2,000,000 (2 million) CDs with the offending software are in consumers hands right now. Lets see... some quick math brings the total amount Sony could be penalized for to right around $1,999,999,500,000... Nearly two trillion dollars. Not quite a sensible amount, I'll admit, but it would come down quite a bit on appeal. All of this thanks to a law that Sony helped push through in the late 20th century. Nice going, douche-nozzles.

The only thing that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth is actually using the DMCA. I understand, from a certain aspect, that yes, it's a law, so it should be used. However, I decry the usage of it by them against us, so I become a hypocrite by advocating it's usage against one of the RIAA members. All-in-all, though, the bitter taste of depending on the DMCA is washed clean by the sweet, sweet irony.

Seriously, someone should get on this. Nail those bastards.