Oh, more SonyBMG news too. A federal judge over there in America has given final approval to SonyBMG's settlement regarding the shambles that no one called Rootkit-gate.
As you'll remember, SonyBMG installed a kind of copy-protection software on 50 odd US albums which cleverly buggered up the computers of anyone who put the CD into their PCs. A number of affected consumers, supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, launched a class action lawsuit against the major record company. In response, SonyBMG offered to replace any affected CDs with un-copy protected versions, to provide the facility to remove the copy-protection software from affected customer's PCs and, as compensation, to offer those customers $7.50 and a free album download.
Actually, I'm pretty sure they'd offered that compensation package before the class action lawsuit even reached court, but either way, the US courts, which gave its temporary approval at the start of the year, have now formally ruled that SonyBMG's response was suitable and sufficient.
The ruling was welcomed by both SonyBMG and the aforementioned EFF. The Frontier Foundation's lawyer, Kurt Opsahl, told reporters: "This is a good deal for music fans. The software that caused this debacle is not going to be on any more discs and we encourage that everyone that has bought affected discs to take advantage of this settlement". With that in mind the EFF have published information for US record buyers who think they may have been affected at http://www.eff.org/sony/.