Sony Pulls XCP CDs, Will Offer Exchanges

Sony's copy protection debacle has gone from "bad" to "nightmare:" now the company is pulling XCP music CDs from retail shelves and promising exchanges for consumers.

Music distributor Sony BMG said Monday it is withdrawing music CDs shipped with the controversial XCP copy protection scheme from retail shelves and plans to set up a program for consumers to exchange CDs with XCP copy protection. The company says details of the consumer exchange program should be announced later in the week; in the meantime, Sony BMG hopes that pulling some of its most popular CDs from retailers will go a long way towards restoring consumer confidence that, if a customer buys a CD by a Sony artist, the disk not going to interfere with their computer or create a security hole.

Sony’s plan only applies to CDs with XCP copy protection, developed by the UK’s First 4 Internet. Sony will continue to ship copy-protected music CDs with software by SunComm, which, to date, has not been subject to the same technical and media backlash as the XCP software.

Sony’s withdrawal of XCP CDs from retailers comes after a maelstrom of trouble surrounding the copy protection software. First, Windows analyst Mark Russinovich identified the XCP software as a cloaked rootkit which potentially destabilized Windows and users could not easily remove without damaging their Windows installations.

The nature of the software