Sony is scrambling now that they've been caught installing rootkit spyware on systems that play their music CD's.

The firestorm began when Mark Russinovich, a computer security expert with Sysinternals, discovered evidence of a "rootkit" on his Windows PC. Through heroic forensic work, he traced the code to First 4 Internet, a British provider of copy-restriction technology that has a deal with Sony to put digital rights management on its CDs. It turns out Russinovich was infected with the software when he played the Sony BMG CD Get Right With the Man by the Van Zant brothers.

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On Wednesday, Sony answered its critics by promising to issue a patch that allows antivirus software to pierce First 4 Internet's cloaking function. But in our view, the hacker and virus threat is something of a red herring. The harm of the Sony DRM scheme is not that it enables evildoers, but that Sony itself did evil.

Shorter Sony: "Oops, you caught us (damn). We promise to remove the evil software that we shouldn't have installed in the first place, and we'll be a lot more careful about covering our tracks in the future".

And the music industry wonders why people distrust them.