Let us leave aside the fact that their company wilfully planted malicious code on hundreds of thousands of Windows PCs worldwide. Let us also ignore the fact that this 'anti-piracy' measure punishes Sony's customers (i.e. those poor souls who actually paid money for their own machines to be rooted) with serious breaches of privacy and security, while doing absolutely nothing to stop mass-scale copyright infringement.

We can also leave aside that Sony first lied about the security risks, then made it all but impossible to uninstall the Trojan, and then released an 'uninstaller', which is even worse than the original rootkit.

And let us pretend that there will not be any viruses that readily use the holes that Sony has so graciously made available for potential authors, and that they will not clog up the 'Net for the rest of us.

I am going to ignore all of those, and instead zero in on Sony's own copyright infringement. For here is the chance for Sony's management to experience what it is like when large corporates dictate morals to protect their cartels.

Sony's rootkit includes copyrighted code written by someone else. This code is made available under an incredibly generous licence: you are free to use it in either open or closed source applications, as long as the copyright notice remains intact.