Mark's Sysinternals Blog has a post detailing a great piece of detective work he did to find that Sony had installed a rootkit on his PC when he played a certain CD with copy protection. Not only had they installed a piece of possibly malicious software on his PC without his knowledge, they provided no way to remove it.

Is this the straw that...(you know the rest)? I know this story has prompted me to boycott any Sony artists' CDs. Do the record labels really think that they can improve sales by treating all their customers like criminals? I know piracy is a problem (or at least the record companies' possibly inflated figures say it is), but they have to go about reducing piracy in a more intelligent way. For instance, if it is cheap enough to buy a song legally and reliably, why would anyone go to eDonkey or other services and waste time downloading junk that is poor quality, or worse yet, contains a virus or spyware? Now, what I am calling cheap is far from what iTunes sells their songs for. I am thinking more like $0.10 per song, not $0.99. I think the increase in volume would more than make up for the price reduction. Besides, it costs the industry the same amount to distribute 10M songs as it does to distribute 1M songs on iTunes. So selling 10M songs at $0.01 brings in $1M and selling 1M songs at $0.99 brings in $990k with the same operating expenses. Not only does the former method reap as much profit as the latter, the former reduces the amount of piracy without any extra effort.

I think these labels need to change their business strategy right now, or risk losing even more business.

Personally, I look forward to the days when everyone is sick and tired of the big label's business practices and stops buying crappy music and starts making their own music. We will soon be back to days where the only music people listened to was performed live by family members. Sounds much better to me.

Remember: BOYCOTT SONY MUSIC!