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Story: Amazon users campaign against Sony's copy-restriction technology

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At least in Holland you can't illegally download music for personal use because that's not illegal under such circumstances. What is illegal however is to distribute music without proper approval (which many peer-to-peer share programs would like you to do but usually you can select a 'do not share' option somewhere or choose not to share anything that's copyrighted).

Also, there's an additional 'tax' placed on various blank media (such as CD-R) to compensate respective rights holders for 'their loss of income'. At least in Holland.

In short, downloaded music under the described conditions above is perfectly legal in Holland, of excellent quality, can be copied (for personal use) on anything you want until you're blue in the face and is basicly already payed for.

Nevertheless the respective rights holders would like you to purchase music electronicly anyway (with what kind of insurances that they'll protect your credit card details, privacy info, etc?), usually force you to use a certain media player and/or force you to use a certain web browser that only works on a certain OS which isn't cheap either and comes with its own set of headaches, force you to install DRM software that comes with license terms and maintenance you might not like, limit you to the number of devices you can play your music on, might even restrict what you can and can't do with your music, don't mind if you can't restore what's needed should your system crash, listen to their FUD campaigns that don't exactly make you aware of all your rights, hardly mention the risk you run and take, bombard you with commercials (usually banners, e-mails, etc) to "come use our music download manager", etc, etc..

This all has been happening for months and months already but the only thing people get steamed about is the Sony DRM rootkit?

Excuse me but you mean to tell me that you are completely aware of all of the above and are perfectly happy about paying for something you don't need paying for (at least in Holland) while restricting your rights at the same time and setting yourself up for who knows what kind of problems and frustrations later on but a rootkit (which is thankfully used by plenty of malware and spyware spreaders for who knows how long without any action to speak of from Microsoft and various anti-virus vendors; guess we like spyware) installed by Sony is the only thing that really upsets people and even enough to single out Sony?

Well, think of Sony what you will but I would say that the Sony rootkit is the least of your problems should you care to look at the greater picture.

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