The most amazing part of the whole DRM nightmare thing with Sony is the company's public reaction - there hasn't been much of one. What little we've seen has been straight denial. I linked to this story in a previous post, but I didn't quote the part that clearly shows a PR disconnect:

Fast-forward to Nov. 4, 2005, when Thomas Hesse, president of Sony's Global Digital Business was interviewed on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, and said of complaints that Sony's anti-piracy software behaved exactly like a rootkit:

"Most people, I think, don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"

Somewhere at Sony, one of their defense lawyers spewed his coffee when he heard that. Thus far, Sony not only doesn't recognize that they did anything wrong - they don't recognize the swirling PR nightmare that has wrapped around them. Dell took some heat for the "Dell Hell" series of posts from Jeff Jarvis, but that was small potatoes compared to this. Even so, the example should have reminded Sony of the first rule of holes - when you're in one, stop digging.

They still haven't connected the dots - what started out as a few bloggers having a "wtf?" kind of reaction has morphed into a full scale PR failure. It's worse than Dell's mistake; they were simply silent. Sony is insouciantly using the Alfred E. Neumann strategy (What, me Worry?). Thus far, they've been acting like a child - when caught by their parents with their hand in the cookie jar - they simply deny, deny, deny. It doesn't work for 4 year olds, and I'm not sure why the Sony execs think it will work for them. A bunch of class action lawsuits are a fairly blunt cluestick, but it looks like that's what will be required.