When it was discovered that Sony was installing a rootkit on its customers computers via certain audio CD's, I had never seen such an explosion of anger and disgust on the internet. There is absolutely no question that Sony did wrong, and that they deserved to pay heavily for it. Many lawsuits were filed, but were eventually combined into one class action lawsuit. A settlement was proposed, and today approved by a judge. Sony's punishment? Replace the infected CD's with either normal ones or via mp3 downloads, and to pay up to $7.50 to each person filing a claim.

WOW! What a punishment. Man, Sony must really be feeling the heat now! I mean, gee, they only completely destroyed thousands of computers and opened up tons of security holes left and right. And now they can offer you free replacements via download and pay you up to $7.50! For a company that pulls in over $60 billion per year, that's really hitting them where it hurts!!

All right, seriously, this is completely unacceptable. The punishment absolutely does not fit the crime. There should be billions of dollars coming out of this company to pay for what they did, and people should be in jail. Instead, they merely get a slap on the wrist and are told not to do it again. If anything, this only encourages other companies to pull this kind of stunt. Way to go everyone. We sure showed them.