Definitely a rootkit. Rootkits, by themselves, are just information hiders. They are often used in combination with malware, to hide the nasty stuff, but it's still a rootkit if there is no sabotage of the system going on (of course, what happened to the CD player could be considered sabotage).

Some people are already using it:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?s...id=158&tid=206