About ten days ago, Boing Boing posted a timeline of the Sony rootkit fiasco . In summary, Sony decided that the best way of protecting their intellectual property rights was to surreptitiously install spyware/malware on the consumer's PC: it installs itself, hides itself, can keep tabs on practically everything you do with your pc, can report the contents of your pc back to Sony's dark towers without your consent, and (in extreme cases) can infect your family with bird flu. Probably.
Make no mistake: Sony's work was heap bad ju-ju, and very many people got excited enough to have Sony begin the process of backing off (presumably back to the breeding pits to create yet more orcs for their next assault on the last strongholds of the open-source community). Removal software was released by Sony, which didn't work in the "removing" sense, but seems to have worked rather well in the "installing more malware" sense.
And in case Dancin' G*ry is feeling smug, it infects Macs as well, which is possibly the only good PR Sony will get from the episode.
Anyway, my point is that we should not have such short memories. Sony has done this before, albeit with more primitive black-hat tools: I remember that when Neverwinter Nights was released, Sony tinkered with their SecuROM software-protection tool so that it scanned the user's registry, rifling through the software that they had installed and flagging up perfectly legal stuff like Nero as reason enough not to run. Oh, and it could occasionally physically damage the play disk and mess up your opsys - little stuff like that.
All Sony does is annoy legitimate customers. When I was young, I spoke as a child, I acted as a child, and I sometimes did some naughty things involving a BBC micro, a modem, and some supposedly secure servers. Even today, I can defeat the copy protection on any DVD I like, and rip it to my PSP for enjoyment on-the-go. A couple of days after the launch of a title like Football Manager I can find a hacked version that removes the need for me to lug the disk around with me when I want to play on my laptop. Most people can't. And they don't really want to, either. Sony has spent plenty in software costs and a fortune in goodwill burnage to protect its IP only from people who don't really want to contravene in the first place, while doing nothing but provoke those of us who occasionally might.