EMI: We don't use rootkits

Record company The EMI Group has distanced themselves from the Sony DRM controversy by stating that they don't use rootkits.

"The content-protection software that we're using can be easily uninstalled with a standard uninstaller that comes on the disc. EMI is not using any software that hides traces of the program. There is no 'rootkit' behavior, and there are no processes left running in the background," said an EMI spokesman in a statement.

I don't blame EMI for capitalizing on Sony's mistake, but EMI isn't much better, since they still make you install third-party "content protection" software to use the CD in a computer. Perhaps it's less virulent than Sony's, but it still serves no purpose other than to reduce the CD's usefulness, punishing paying customers while doing nothing to stop piracy.

Per the Red Book specification, computers can read audio CDs. Any effort to make a CD unreadable in a computer must of necessity cripple one or the other. I'm not interested in buying a crippled CD that I can't use how I want, and I'm certainly not interested in paying a record company to compromise my PC with malicious software.