Sony. While Sony BMG failed to win Parlophone (which ultimately went to Warner Music Group), BMG acquired Mute Records' back catalogue and licensed Depeche Mode and the catalogue of The Echo Label to Sony. Controversies Payola fine In July 2005, Sony BMG was fined $10 million after the New York Attorney General's office determined that they had been practicing payola mostly in the form of direct payments to radio stations and bribes to disc jockeys to promote various artists including Franz Ferdinand, Audioslave, and mainly Jessica Simpson. Epic Records, one of their labels, was specifically cited for using fake contests in order to hide the fact that the gifts were going to disc jockeys rather than listeners. Rootkit scandal On 31 October 2005, a scandal erupted over digital rights management (DRM) software produced and shipped by Sony BMG that automatically installed itself on people's computers and made them more vulnerable to computer viruses. The scandal and attendant controversy about the practice of software auto-installation spawned several lawsuits. Sony BMG eventually recalled all of the affected CDs. On November 16, 2005, US-CERT, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of the United States Department of Homeland Security, issued an advisory on Extended Copy Protection DRM, citing the XCP use of rootkit technology to hide certain files from the computer user as a security threat to computer users, saying that a Sony-provided uninstallation option also introduced computer system vulnerabilities. US-CERT advised, "Do not install software from sources that you do not expect to contain software, such as an audio CD." In its "Top Flops of '05" issue, the enterprise newsweekly eWeek had to create a new category for the "Sony BMG root-kit fiasco." Peter Coffee, of eWeek Labs reported, "The Sony brand name was already in trouble—it lost 16 percent of its value between 2004 and 2005.... Now it has taken a blow among tech-product opinion leaders. "We've never done it before, and we hope we'll never have [an] occasion to do it again but, for 2005, eWeek Labs awards a Stupid Tech Trick grand prize to Sony." eWeek Vol. 22, No.50 Kazaa file-sharing lawsuit In October 2007, Sony BMG, alongside other large music firms, successfully sued Jammie Thomas for making 24 songs available for download on the Kazaa file-sharing network. Thomas, who made US$36,000 a year, was ordered to pay US$222,000 in damages. Thomas had allegedly shared 1702 files in