Boycott BMG's Journal: About the Sony-BMG rootkit

Frequently on /. and other places on the internet, I read that Sony is evil because they put rootkits on music CDs. Those same people say that because of that they are boycotting everything with Sony on it. The problem with that reasoning is that it wasn't actually Sony that was responsible for the rootkit. The rootkit was put on those CDs by Sony-BMG, which is a separate entity that is 50/50 owned by Sony and Bertelsmann (BMG stands for Bertelsmann Music Group). Furthermore, the people at the top, who make all of the important decisions are all from the BMG side. So, if any company is to blame, it is Bertelsmann.

So, what should activist people do? Do they boycott all Bertelsmann owned properties? If they lived in Germany that would be almost impossible. My suggestion would be to boycott the product that Sony-BMG puts out-their music CDs.

Does this mean that there is no reason to hate Sony? No, they still did some pretty rotten things like getting lik-sang shut down, putting ARccOS copy protection that makes DVDs unreadable in a small number of DVD players, and getting FixVTS and Ripit4me (a combination of programs that bypass ARccOS) shut down. A reasonable person can still dislike Sony for those things, just not for the rootkit.