Congratulations on the US-centric view of the world. However, whether or not you agree with the decision this is a UK case and has sod all to do with the US, legally or otherwise.

The only thing amusing about you is how wrong you are. Repeatedly. I'm sure Sony were loving the whole thing but they didn't have anything to do with it and no one involved cares if Sony were dancing a jig about the extra sales (unlikely given that something like this is still a pittance for a multi-national like Sony). The people who keep bringing it up in smug, self-congratulatory tones are setting up a non-existent position to make themselves feel superior for noticing something that every other fucker has known all along. It's neither big, clever nor even vaguely relevant to the facebook campaign.

The profit that they're (not) going to be making from the free gig they've pledged to hold in the UK in 2010 as a thank you and a victory party?

"Get it off!" Ah, memories.

You're an idiot. The facebook campaign has nothing to do with Sony, it was started by Jon Morter, a 35 year old part time rock DJ, as a joke. He tried to rickroll the Xmas #1 last year but didn't get anywhere so this year he picked Killing in the Name and, in the way that things on the internet sometimes do, it totally exploded out of all proportion. The ONLY point of the campaign was to try and break the stranglehold that the X-factor have had on the UK Xmas chart for the previous 4 years and see if they could make the race for the Xmas #1 spot exciting again (something that, pre-X-Factor, has been a British tradition for years). The campaign succeeded and the icing on the cake was that Killing... actually got to #1. And RATM only became involved a few days ago after some of their friends from the UK told them about it. It amazes me that people are still peddling this recycled bullshit day after day. Oh, and Cowell offered Jon and Tracy (his wife and co-founder of the group) jobs after they were so monumentally successful. And they turned him down.

Not at all. As said the ratings are a measure of how much a person enjoys the game and wants to play it. A fair number of people no longer want to play the game due to the way GW handled all of this, therefore rating it a 1 at this point in time is entirely reasonable (and people can update their rating whenever they wish). Note that no one at the site is disputing that GW has a right to protect their IP, they're just incensed at the ham fisted and customer unfriendly way that they went about it. Personally I just dropped my rating entirely rather than engaging in protest rating (which I feel devalues the rating system whilst not actually achieving much of anything.)