Sony President: Rootkit of No Concern

In an interview with NPR late last week, Sony BMG's Global Digital Business President Thomas Hesse downplayed the recent DRM fiasco saying he objected to terms such as malware, spyware and rootkit. "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" he said.

Hesse acknowledged that the controversial First 4 Internet technology that installs and "cloaks" the DRM software without a user's permission shipped on about 20 CDs. But "no information ever gets gathered about the user behavior," he claimed. "This is purely about restricting the ability to burn MP3 files in an unprotected manner."