I’ll prefix this by saying I believe pirates should be dealt with very harshly and that I view most of the “information wants to be free” crowd as lamers trying to develop a high-falutin’ rationalization for their thievery.
Despite all that, Sony has gone way too far. They are putting out so-called “copyright-protected” CDs which can only be played on a computer if you use the player that’s on the disc. That’s not the problem. The problem is that the player patches the Windows kernel to hide itself from spyware programs and disables your optical drive if you uninstall it (looks like you’d need to reinstall Windows to fix the damage).
Here’s the Washington Post blog entry on it and here’s the excellent forensics at the Sysinternals blog.
UPDATE:
You don’t need to re-install windows. You can delete the driver filter (see the Sysinternals blog) and get the optical drive working again.
Your asumption:
“copyright-protected” CDs which can only be played on a computer if you use the player that’s on the disc.
is not correct. It is a resonably normal CD until after their software is installed. Only then does it require their player. There is many ways around it before hand but once Windoze is infected you are in a pickle. The way it infects is through the Auto-Play “feature” of Windoze.