This morning, Sony BMG became the second record label to jump on board the Finnish phone giant’s Comes With Music offering, which–when it launches in the second half of 2008, will package mobile phones with a year of unlimited access to music. There are, however, certain caveats to that value proposition, as I pointed out last December:

Though Comes With Music does indeed permit owners of certain Nokia cellphones to download as many songs as humanly possible in one year (with no per-song data charges), transfer them to a PC and keep them at the end of that time, they must pay a per-song usage fee to burn them to CD. What’s more, the songs are wrapped in Microsoft’s (MSFT) ironically named ‘Plays for Sure’ digital-rights management scheme, which prevents them from being played on the iPod, Zune, etc. Finally, another 12 months access to the music catalog requires the purchase of a brand new phone.”

Clearly, Sony, like Universal (VIV.PA) before it, doesn’t see these issues as off-putting to consumers. “When you give consumers the key to the candy store without any limitations, there’s a lot more opportunity for discovering music that you might not have found before,” said Thomas Hesse, president of global digital business and U.S. sales for Sony BMG Music Entertainment. “We think this will energize the discovery of music.”

It might energize Sony BMG’s bottom line a bit as well. When Universal first signed up for Comes with Music, sources close to the company said that Nokia would pay the label up to $35 for every phone that offers access to its library. Nokia subsequently denied it was paying that amount, but it’s definitely paying something–to Universal, Sony and whatever other labels it manages to line up for the service.

Interesting that Sony would accuse Amergence of failure to meet its specifications now. After all, you’d think that’s an issue it would have taken up with the company two years ago, after its own engineers presumably reviewed the software and, if not then, perhaps on Oct. 4, 2005–the day Finnish security outfit F-Secure warned it that the software posed a serious security risk. “If [Sony] had woken up and smelled the coffee when we told them there was a problem, they could have avoided this trouble,” Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure’s director of antivirus research, told BusinessWeek at the time.

“We told them it was a major security risk,” added Santeri Kangas, F-Secure’s director of research. “They thought we were silly. They wanted to keep the problem quiet.”

That’s certainly what it looked like at the time. What with Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG’s global digital business division, telling NPR that “most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” ‘Course you tend to forget about those things when you’re busy redistributing blame, right?