http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1887181,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000614 is an interesting read, as to how many sony cds are out there that have this DRM. Australia does get a mention.

Having read the Washington post article I think the best we can say is that Sony is highly incompetent. At worst they don't actually give a stuff about consumers and are recklessly negligent. Remember when Sony simply meant suppliers of very good quality electrical equipment. I think they need a major uninstallers for a very large slab of their managment.

the latest hre-
Sony to recall all affected CD's
http://www.theage.com.au/news/breaking/sony-bmg-recalls-millions-of-cds/2005/11/17/1132016895774.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1

hmmm
when do I get my money back???

The Sony site Revamp
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/index.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/customerletter.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/home.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/titles.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/contact.html
http://cp.sonybmg.com/xcp/english/faq.html

Voluntary ‘Exchange Program’ - Which is only valid if you have a US Postal Address
Bad luck for the 120,000 Canadians. I presume Amazon will contact any international customers.
http://www.upsrow.com/sonybmg/

The interesting part is that nowhere on the site is the word ‘Recall’ used. It is only a ‘Consumers who wish to exchange’ program.

Sony has been clever to avoid the ‘Product Recall’ wording from the information so that they would not need to make a media ‘Press Release’ regarding this issue. If they did make it a ‘Product Recall’ the mainstream media would need to be notified of such a statement with text included along the lines of ‘These 52 titles from the SonyBMG catalogue contain a security threat to personal computer users.’

This would give openness and transparency for all the ‘Loyal Customers’ of these great musicians who do not deserve such appalling treatment. So that the ‘not so well’ informed computer user would also know about this. And not to mention the people who are yet to even attempt to insert the ‘Media Disc’ into their computer. Not everyone reads weblogs Sony. The mainstream media have been alarmingly quiet on this subject thus far, they have no issue in publishing stories regarding other such ‘Mass Malware and Security threats’ that occur on a large scale on the internet or in the public.

Have you also notified all of your recording artists that this has affected so the publicists and representatives of these artists may also take appropriate action. They will need to know this so they can inform there ‘Loyal Fans’ that this will not be on future recordings and all future CD's from this artist will be secure for use on personal computers.

The security implications of this piece of negligent software need to be made public via traditional media. There are definitely far more unsuspecting users who have not inserted the ‘Media Disc’ into their ‘Microsoft Windows Environment’ which may include any computers that also run virtualised machines on top of Microsoft, Apple or Unix/Linux operating systems. As this software does have hardware issues that may affect the functionality of a computer owners CD-Rom device.

Fred? Stuart? You still there fellas?

EFF Files Class Action Lawsuit Against Sony BMG
Company Should Repair Damage to Customers Caused by CD Software
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), along with two leading national class action law firms, today filed a lawsuit against Sony BMG, demanding that the company repair the damage done by the First4Internet XCP and SunnComm MediaMax software it included on over 24 million music CDs.
http://www.eff.org/news/archives/2005_11.php#004192