Today in History : Sony suspended CD copy protection

2005 – In an effort to curb piracy, record companies began putting copy protection on the CD’s themselves.  The electronic marking would cause CD’s to error out if they tried to copy. Unfortunately this idea was riddled with problems. Some players couldn’t read the disks, other people would find ways around the copy protection, such as different brand drives. However, it was found that the XCP copy protection standard became a backdoor for hackers as viruses could be introduced through the software.The announcement came ten days after Sony had secretly put this system on the shelves.

2008 – A bill for $73 million dollars was sent to Microsoft, Google and Carl Icahn. This was for the operation costs (including incremental costs) for outside advertisers to acquire Yahoo!