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Another Class Action Over Crippled Music Disks
pulaski writes "Here's a link to an interesting Baltimore Sun story. It's about the case of two Californians trying to take some major record companies to task for selling copy protected CDs. It's got the classic Cary Sherman whine but the plaintiffs apparently have some legal muscle." A similar suit was settled with the defendants agreeing to make changes in their practices.
The RIAA President quoted in the article implies that what they're doing to copy protect disks is some kind of encryption. My understanding is that this is not the case. They're basically messing with the directory structure of the disk in such a way that computers will misunderstand what's going on and will, at minimum, be unable to play or read the music. Isn't he being somewhat misleading by calling this encryption when in fact its an issue of deliberately failing to follow the CD standard? Is this distinction going to play a significant role in the class action?
Because the consumer pays for it. Fair use law says that once you buy it, it's yours for your personal use any way you want. I can buy the finest china platters and use them for skeet shooting. I can buy a porsche convertible and use it as a flowerpot. I can buy a newspaper and use it to train my dog, or read it on the subway, or read it in the john or at the breakfast table. It's unlawful for the copyright owner to determine how I use the product I buy from them. What I am buying is, in effect, a personal license to use the product (music). If I wish to wire it into the shower so it plays loudly while my mate sings, that's fair use.
Designing the product so that it destroys or disables other products is unlawful. Eventually, rich enough lawyers will get on the right side of this issue and put a stop to RIAA/MPAA's illegal behavior. This entire post is an opinion only, as IANAL.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I crashed a Win2k server by inserting a scratched CD. It just froze. No blue screen, no error message, it died.
Heh, I've had that happen with no CD at all. It's almost magic.
This is not intended as a troll but, seriously, CD drives and OSs shouldn't freeze up just because there is a faulty CD in the drive. This is just one more example of crappy software/hardware design. Behaviour like this gives me a strong impulse to take the computer back to the shop.
On the other hand, spitting a flawed disc out and putting up a popup with "Defective Compact Disk" would be more likely to encourage the user to return the CD and demand a refund.
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I prefer the term "anti-play" technology. That's what the technology does; it prevents you from playnig the music.