When Sony initially started its Digital Audio Player Walkman series, they were totally against the MP3 format, however after very poor sales, they added MP3 support on their later Walkman series.  Now, after causing so much grief and anger with their XCP rootkit based copy protection software, Sony BMG has finally announced that it would do anything it possibly can to amend the customers who have been affected.

So Sony BMG has decided to do one thing that no one would ever dream of Sony Corp. nor Sony BMG doing, by e-mailing the affected customers a link to their website where they can download unprotected MP3 tracks of their affected CDs as part of the exchange programme.  4.7 million CDs with the XCP software have been recalled and customers can send back their affected CDs for replacement unprotected CDs of the same titles in return.

Due to further controversy over the security issues of Sony BMG's recent uninstall tool, the company has announced that they would make a new uninstall tool available.  Unfortunately, this will not be the end of copy-protection either for the company as they still emphasise that it is an important tool for protecting their own and the artists' intellectual property rights.  Thanks to Hypnosis4U2NV who used our news submit to let us know about the following news:

It seems like Sony has finally given up with the copy-protection on the 52 affected discs.   Then again from what I can see, offering MP3 versions of the tracks is not going to make piracy any worse either since chances are that the tracks of all 52 CDs would likely be widely shared at this point, not to mention that the only people who were affected by this nasty software were those who have actually got the official CDs!  However, at least the consumers can play these replacement tracks on any MP3 player, including iPods and not just those supporting some form of DRM. 

Source: Reuters - Technology News