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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."
EMI has just lost a trial about copy-protected CD's in France too (and the consumer association behind it is now suing Sony and BMG).
you can read the complete article at : http://linuxfr.org/2003/06/26/13036.html/ (in french)
People in countries other then yours commonly use a , instead of a . to seperate their "dollars" from their "cents"... whenever you see something like $ 350,00 (particuarly when this figure is quoted in the foreign media) and it doesn't make any sense to you, simply replace the offending , with an .
DJ kRYPT's Free MP3s!
Brazil uses the "," instead of "." to denote the decimal place, in fact a lot of countries do. Therefore, this would be $350.00 (three hundred fifty dollars and zero cents) american.
"I have a porkchop, you have a porkchop. I have a veal, you have a veal".
No.
Sec 103 of the DMCA amends Title 17 of the U.S. Code to prohibit circumvention of a technological measure that effective controls access to a work.
It then goes on to define the relevant terms thusly:
"(A) to 'circumvent a technological measure' means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
(B) a technological measure 'effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work."
I live in Brazil. The CDs DO have small print on the back saying that they may not work on some personal computers, Macs included. But nothing about cars, DVD players, Discmans and other stuff. However...
Put the CD on a Mac (I'm running OS X) and 2 partitions are mounted: The first one with the 'player' used to play the disc on Wintel PCs, and the second one with the audio tracks. Drag them to the desktop and... voilá! Instant rip!
I'm not sure if the argument is the same in Brazil but here the reasoning is that all music CDs are labelled with that little "Compact Disc" symbol which means it complies with the red book standard for audio CDs. Copy protected CDs still have that label, but they don't completely conform to the standard.
Yes it is Philips, and Philips has already said they cannot use the logo on non-standard discs.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.