How ironic. I bet that there are already people in Sony's head office thinking of hari kari considering the huge backlash they are receiving for selling CD's with malware in it. I first wrote about this here.
To add insult to injury, it turns out that the software on the CD's to prevent you from freely copying the CD actually contains stolen code. That's fitting that they would be caught using stolen software code to prevent others from 'stealing' their music. Of course to 'steal' the music, you first have to buy it. (Sony probably did not know about the stolen code.)
The technology that Sony BMG used to prevent piracy of audio CDs is itself based on stolen code, according to Sebastian Porst and Matti Nikki, two individuals from Germany and Finland respectively who looked into the application. - VNUnet.com
I stated earlier that I have not bought Sony products for a long time and recently added Sony CDs to the boycot list. Now I will not purchase any protected CD. Often I am buying the CD for just 1 song and i'll just go find it on the net.
How many people are now working on a CD drive that cloaks itself as a normal CD player to the disk. I think thats not difficult to do. The CD drive would not be able to do anything but play CDs, but at least you could listen to the CD without downloading anything as well as create your own MP3s and not worry about any code that they might put on the CD.
There will always be a way around DRM. Just like the DVD region coding system. $40 got me a program that negates the region code system. Even if the DVD folks figure a way to negate the software, i'll just buy a second DVD drive and tell one that its in Europe and the other that its in the US.
Sony rootkit accused of GPL violation - VNUnet.com
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