This week Sony’s increasingly random flailings in the digital music realm have snagged it a partnership with Nokia, wherein users of Nokia phones will receive free music for a whole year on, presumably, someone’s dime other than their own. (Though I’d be not at all shocked to see Nokia up its prices to cover the cost — a Sony BMG tax, if you will.)

If I were feeling particularly mean, I’d suggest that this is actually an attempt by Sony to offload some “excess inventory” — really, is anyone still buying Britney Spears at this point? The Dixie Chicks? Ricky Martin? But as fate would have it, I’m only feeling slightly mean — mean enough to revisit Sony’s storied history of failure in the realm of digital music.

Sony was once the king of personal music devices. Its Walkman cassette players dominated the industry for roughly twenty years — an unthinkable run for a consumer electronics product these days. And the Discman CD players that followed did just fine too. But Sony was utterly unprepared for the digital music revolution. Sony took two years after the iPod’s debut to intro its Network Walkman digital music player — and then made the fatal decision of ditching MP3 support in order to emphasize its own ATRAC music format.

Today, the iPod defines portable digital music. Sony’s efforts barely constitute a footnote.

Of course, the devices are just one part of the equation. You also need a music distribution mechanism, and Apple’s is iTunes. Sony tried to fill this gap for its own players with the Sony Connect music store — an endeavor so successful that in five days from this posting Sony is shuttering it completely.

Sony seems to have finally decided that the best it can do is to give its music away. But don’t think for a second that the Masters of Rootkit have seen the light about giving consumers control over their music. (If you were thinking that, allow me a chortle at your expense.) This “free” music being provided to Nokia’s customers will be DRMed out the wazoo: “The ‘Comes with music’ library will be transferable to PCs and to a new Nokia handheld; however, users won’t be able to transfer it to certain non-compatible devices, such as iPods.” There’s one way to enforce those kinds of limitations, and it’s not through the honor system.

What’s really insidiously ingenious about this plan is that casual use of the singular: “a new Nokia handheld.” Not, notably, new Nokia handhelds you might purchase in the future. So what happens after you’ve spent a year downloading your “free” Sony BMG songs and decide you’d like a spiffy new Nokia device? Does the “Comes with music” library come with you? Nobody’s saying… and silence in the realm of DRM restrictions is almost never a good thing.

On the surface, Sony BMG and Nokia are promising a lot of free music — and who can say no to that? But “never a free lunch” is a cliché for good reason. Sony intends to get its payday here somehow, and they’ve already proven they really don’t care what they have to do to get it.

As Ars Technica puts it, “a rootkit is a program or set of programs that allow a usually malicious user to maintain access to an compromised computer by sinking deep hooks into the OS.” Sony was not merely trying to govern what listeners could do with its music; it was attempting to control what users could do with their computers.

Stewart Baker, assistant secretary for policy of Homeland Security, issued one of the most succinct responses to Sony’s actions: “It’s very important to remember that it’s your intellectual property — it’s not your computer.” Sony had showed just how much regard it had for the property rights of its customers. But more than that, it had left these customers open to data loss and attack by hackers: “Sony’s application will utterly hose your Vista install… Sony’s rootkit provides a means of entry for other hackers to compromise your system.”

The truth will out, as they say. And in the case of Sony’s little experiment, it outed rather quickly. Less than a month after Mark Russinovich brought public attention to the rootkit issue, Sony stated it would stop distributing the copy-protection software on its music CDs.

The fiasco wasn’t over for Sony. A product recall and multiple lawsuits would soon follow — costing Sony several million dollars (a pittance given the size of the company and the seriousness of the offense) and no small amount of consumer goodwill. But as far as I know, Sony has never apologized for the rootkit decision or promised that such a technique will never be utilized again.

Here at home, I issued a complete Sony boycott. Dramatic, perhaps; but I was steamed at Sony’s utter hubris and contempt for its customers. We probably haven’t followed it perfectly — thankfully, the Transformers soundtrack turned out to be a Warner Brothers rather than a Sony BMG release — but by and large we have kept Sony products out of the home.

Thus as far as I can see, I will never own a Playstation 3. I will never own a Blu-ray player of any kind. (Sony is not the only party behind Blu-ray, but they are closely bound up with its success.) The latter shouldn’t be too hard: with the rise of digital downloads, high-definition DVDs were obsolete before they arrived on the scene. The next movie player I invest in is much more likely to be an Apple TV than anything built around optical media.

Sony items which were already in the home prior to the boycott were allowed to remain. Sony already had my money there, I figured. Discarding them wouldn’t do anything to hurt the company.

So why bring this up more than two years after the event? The reason is this: I like to lift weights, and I like to use my iPod while doing so. The thing with lifting weights is, if you employ any effort in the process, it makes it difficult to keep your face in a neutral configuration. And if your facial expression changes, so do the shape of your ears. (You can try this for yourself.) iPod earbuds aren’t designed to remain in place under these conditions, so I found myself needing constantly to readjust the little white nuisances.

It was time to try new earbuds. Offerings at the Apple store were divided between the $100+ stratum and that occupied by Apple’s own $40 in-ear offering. I’m not paying $100 for workout headphones, so Apple brand it was. Unfortunately, through some quirk of otology, these were even less inclined to remain in place than the standard earbuds.

One of the Sony products grandfathered in after the boycott was a pair of cheap blue earbuds with hooks designed to hang on the ears. Their design is mediocre. Their sound quality is passable at best.

They also stay on my head no matter what I try.

After all this time, wearing a Sony product centimeters from my brain makes me slightly ill — as if the earbuds might try to rootkit my cerebral cortex. But they work, and I’m running with it for now.

You’ve won this battle, Sony. But I still intend to win the war.