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EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks
neves writes "A brazilian consumer has sued EMI and Sony, and won! The reason was a copy protection technology in the best seller album "Tribalistas" that didn't play in his car. You can read about it in Folha de São Paulo (babelfish translation here), brazilian biggest newspaper. They must be very afraid, since EMI vice-president defended the company himself in a lawsuit involving less than US$ 350,00. A more detailed report is in my music site Agenda do Samba & Choro (babelfish here), where we release some of the lawsuit files to make it easier for others to sue them. Since last year, we are calling for a boycott (babelfish) of copy protected albums. The companies appealed, and said that they will take the case to the Supreme Court, because it is a 'question of principles'. The consumer is sueing them again, because all new EMI albums in Brazil are being released with copy protection and won't work in his car."
Your rights, such as they are, are outlined in the license agreement that you accept. If you do not accept the license agreement, you have no right to use the music. If you use it anyway, you are a felon. This crime is far worse than rape or murder, because it strikes at the heart of the system of natural incentives which drives our free economy. Any "rights" that the vendor chooses to grant you are gifts, pure and simple, and you certainly have not earned them. The vendor has sunk millions of dollars of capital into developing the product. They have every right to expect a return on this investment, and the fact they are generously allowing you to use the music at all is more than you probably deserve. Your role in this culture is to pay them for the work performed by their employees, who are damned lucky to have jobs (and almost certainly don't appreciate it). Pay up and shut up.
These "rights" of the "consumer" are like the "rights" of women or animals; it's an absurdity on the face of it. Slashdot has no business wasting our time with this leftist garbage. It says up there "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Is that what this is? Decidedly not. Competent "nerds" (technical people) are by definition conservative Libertarians, for two reasons: First, they are productive individuals and the principle of rational self-interest proves that they will not support the socialists. Second, they are by definition intelligent and logical people (they work with logic all day, do they not?) and therefore they cannot be fooled by liberal myths and nonsense like so-called "heliocentric" cosmology, "evolution", or the redistribution of wealth (organized coercive parasitism). A leftist nerd is a contradiction in terms, and therefore cannot exist.
Before anyone points out loss of profit from discounted prices, if more people acutally BUY these things at a discount instead of grabbing them off Kazza, these companies would make the same money that they do today.
That is ridiculous.
Do you have any idea how much time and effort these multi-million dollar companies spend on pricing their products? You think they just randomly pluck a number from the air?
They choose a price to maximise profits. They're not stupid...just immoral.
If they're going to convert to US dollars, they should convert to US notation too.
We put up enough with their unicode crap making our life more difficult (half the recent bugs I have found have been because of unicode support). They could at least have the decency to use proper formatting.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Given that they recently forced a student to pay over his life savings
Life savings? We're talking about a friggin' college student!
Forgive me if I don't have sympathy for someone who lost the pennies they saved up from working for four years while living at home.
Music corporations, which employ thousands of people and, at the least, entertain a significant portion of the populace, don't deserve to be destroyed. Litigated to be honest, yes. Destroyed? Hell no.