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Thomas Hesse, who heads up Sony's global business unit, told the BBC that the bad publicity has forced it to re-evaluate, although that does not mean that the record company is going to take a more permissive line.

'The key point to remember is that copyright infringement is a huge issue for the recording industry as a whole and that's where we came from originally,' he said.

Sony has recalled CDs bearing XCP copy protection but has yet to do the same for discs with MediaMax DRM. A software patch designed to fix the security flaw on these discs was itself discovered to pose a risk.