Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

I just noticed Ars has a story about this too.

This seems like a perfect time to stop using Sony products and consuming Sony content. The company has a long track record of doing whatever it can to protect its products. As Hannibal pointed out,

"The company is obsessed with digital piracy, and the PC interfaces for their digital devices are invariably buggy, intrusive, slow, and almost seem to be designed to make the user just give up and buy Sony physical media."

In this case, even buying the Sony physical media is a spectacularly bad idea given what it will do to your system. If it's already on there, good luck getting it off.

I agree Mr Phil, I used to really like Sony, especially hardware wise for home electonics. Lately though it seems every move they make is insanely anti consumer and I just dont buy anything from them anymore, not a CD, not a CD player, so on.

Also I think that Ars article is very good but the statement "doing whatever it can to protect its products" is a bit misleading or easily misconstrued in that context. Certainly no on is saying Sony has no right to protect their products, they do (even if doing that is really dumb when your customers dont want it) but they DONT have a right to do anything to the device I use to PLAY the media, thats the issue. Sony owns the songs sure, but they dont own the record player and all interfaces therein.

Too little. An attitude like "we want to allay any unecessary concerns" shows they still dont understand a large part of the issue. Also "the antipiracy software itself will not be removed, only exposed to view." They are going to "patch" the rootkit so its not a rootkit, remains to be seen, but they still are installing crap on your computer for an audio CD. No thanks.