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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."
how the the indutry's seep pockets didn't help them in court ( at least in Brazil).
Well, as you US guys don't matter for us brazilians, we too don't matter about you guys, so...
This shows one of the main limitations of the laissez-faire capitalism that USia endorses over the more rational policies implemented in the rest of the world. When corporations are as unfettered as they are in USia, getting them to agree on things like CD-ROM standards is a herculean task - each corporation is assured that it has the One True path.
In Brazil OTOH they're more used to being told what to do by more socialist governments, and the idea of a standard is more easily applicable to the way they work within regulations anyway.
Copy protection is like the war on drugs. It doesn't work. It's been tried for at least 20 years and the problem has only gotten worse. Remeber code wheels? And then the classic "page 36, paragraph 3, line 7, word 2". It only serves to make life more difficult for the legitimate user.
The real solution to stop piracy is to drop the prices on software, music, and movies to a reasonable amount. A friend of mine was offered a free copy of Windows XP and turned it down because he got such a large student discount (I think $20) that it didn't matter to him. 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.
----
Squirrel
Maybe this is a joke, but... ... be considered, in all actuality, as a violation of the DMCA? you are informing people of a way to violate copyright protection schemes.
Wouldn't your posting this information on slashdot:
"buy your CD's from Brazil in order to get media that isn't crippled"
Just a thought.
FREENET=FREESPEECH
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
The companies appealed, and said that they will take the case to the Supreme Court, because it is a 'question of principles'.
It is difficult for me to read this sentence and not be a little angry at its blatant hypocrisy. "Principles" indeed:
The vice-president of EMI, Bannitz Luiz, affirms that she is inevitable will happen problems in situations of implantation of new technologies. "the consumer complains, we changes the product. But it is lamentable that certain people use this as extortion form "
Right, because not being able to listen to a CD in my car is an "inevitable problem." And suing them because I can't do this is "extortion." Exactly what principles do these companies subscribe to? (Don't answer.)
The only principle involved here is an affirmation of one's rights as a consumer.
The coolest voice ever.
I was in Brazil in March and I almost bought the Tribalistas CD when I saw the notice that it was copy protected.
If I can't copy the songs to my MP3 player, I won't buy the damn thing. I imagine they've lost a lot of sales.
By the way, all of Tribalista's songs are available in Kazaa, proving copy protection doesn't work. Talk about the medicine being worst than the disease.
I haven't read the story, but this bloke is on the right track. When we buy music CD's, we are in fact purchasing a license to listen to the audio content, along with a fee for the media the licensed content is supplied on. What we end up owning is the media, and a perpetual license to listen to the content. If the media becomes damaged, our license to listen to the content is still valid. Therefore, we should be able to duplicate the content ro protect our investment in the license fee we have paid to listen to it. In summary, we are paying to listen to the music, not the media it is supplied on. By not allowing us to protect our investment, we are in fact being ripped-off. I for one, wish that more people would realise this. If they did, then perhaps more people would start to take a stance to protect their rights, when they realise that we are in fact being ripped off. The real pirates are the companies who are forcing us to purchase multiple licenses to listen to music, for which we have already paid. We need to make the courts, and policitians aware of this double-dipping that is being snuck in under the guise of "protection from pirates" In my view "Media Pirates", are people who duplicate and sell for profit, not individuals who are simply trying to listen to something they have paid a license for.
A copy-protected 'CD' is a contradiction in terms.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Your Rights Online: EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks
Music Disks?
Ahem. Compact Discs, Hard Disk Drives. It's not that hard to get right.
I'm sure someone will mod this down as flamebait but, seriously, would it kill the editors to do their jobs and actually edit the articles that get posted?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
We laugh, knowing that US law will never become world law.
Ummm, yeah, only the 150 and growing signatories to the WTO will be subject to TRIPS, plus what 20 pending applicants. Hell the TRIPS treaty even mentions countries may be as liberal as the USA by 'allowing' american style "fair-use" exceptions to 'intelectual property' (The single quotes are mine, the double quotes theirs.)
Unless you plan to live in Cuba you ignore your rulers in the American congress at your own peril.
I used to run a register and I *HATE* people like you. Like the cashier has a damn thing to do with it. You put them thru more work for something they have no control over. Think, brother, think. Is he or she going to say anything to the boss? I doubt it, they are just there trying to make a buck on minimum wage and couldn't care less. By the end of the day, what you did will just blend in with the rest of the fools. Maybe you should find a better way of protesting.
I should be able to travel whatever products I choose from anywhere I want, excepting only really offensive stuff like narcotics and weaponry.
Baptists:
Nudists:
Muslims:
Jews:
Loggers:
Earth First:
If you seriously believe that the Democrats wouldn't do the same, you need to wake up and smell the fucking coffee.
Stop the partisanship and recognize that both parties have serious issues.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Corporations inside the united states are also supposed to serve the public interest. that USED to be important. One of the reasons we had a revolution was because the english corporations were gouging the people here, so we revolted. check the history of the english east indies company and the boston tea party. Corporations are supposed to be GRANTED a license to incorporate, it's not an automatic "right" they have to a collective of people to form an artificial person with any "rights". INDIVIDUALS, human beings have born-with rights, organizations of people organized for the purpose of conducting some business have duties and responsibilities and it's a granted license after application, and do NOT have born with rights because their corporation is a fiction, it's an artificial person, and a long time ago a few judges got bribed by them for them to say their corporation was "alive" and had "personhood".
The deal is, it's too easy and hardly ever have corporations been dissolved, which is also the right of the government (meaning we the people) to do. IF we did that easier and according to law,when these artificial person corporations cease being of the public benefit because of excessive profiteering, we wouldn't be seeing all these abuses and gougings. We regulate commerce in this nation, so YES, we could easily decide if a company was violating the terms of the corporate charter by "making too much profit", ie, "gouging" the people and by so gouging would be in violation of being of benefit to society, and that definetly falls under morals and ethics. that's reason we have so many problems now, attitudes such as you espouse, where "profit" is the ONLY factor in an incorporation. It is ONE factor, but that's the one seized on, but it's not supposed to be the only factor.
For an obvious example, Microsoft needs their corporate charter dissolved, IMO, blatant long running gouging and selling broken software and committing felonius acts. These large music and movie companies, again, chronic serial price gouging and actually engaging in fraud and deceit and bribery (payola). They should have been dissolved a long time ago and the boards of directors chucked in the pokye and disallowed from being in any other corporations, ever. And corporations donating money to political campaio\gns? That's pure bribery, anyone can see that, illegal as all get out. Buying votes, it should be illegal as hell and the ones who engage in it strung up as traitors, both the recipients and the givers. I'm completely serious,struing up, hung, treason charges, this "bribery as legal" is insane, it's nuts, it makes a mockery of the vote, and now we have a professiobnal class of politicians who's sole job is to garnner as much bribe money as possible, then to use slick PR advertising and controlling the government as a shared junta to make sure they stay in their positions to be bribed. We need to lose that stuff, like yesterday, and rein in these out of control INTERNATIONAL -not "US" but international- corporations who gouge the US citizen. Do that to a few hundred or so of the most abusive corporations and corporate/government crooks posing as "leaders", and the honest ones could make the money then, still be profitable, and consumers wouldn't be taken all the time, and the nation as a whole would be better off.
The other way, the way it's run now, is some weird form of international corporate anarchy based on bribes and blackmail mostly, it doesn't exist inside our constitutional framework, much as some people think it says that. The US is not organized anarchy, it's a union of organized individuals and states, based around that union, organized for some modicum of common good and benefit, defense, and trade. But the trade is supposed to not only be profitable for the companies and indidividuals inside those companies, but ALSO good for the nation,it's SUPPOSED to be an equal deal there, ie, they are SUPPOSED to look out for the nation, not just their international "bottom line". That's not to say they can't make m
Unless a guarantee was made that these CDs would work in his car CD player (which there may have been, I don't know), this guy really has no room to complain. Companies don't have an obligation to make products that suit you
perfectly, you know
I disagree.
Consumers buying a disk that looks like a CD, smells like a CD and might reasonably be expected to perform like a CD, have the right to also expect that that disk will play in any machine that carries the official Compact Disc logo -- that's what standards are all about.
The fact that the music industry has deviated from the standard, yet hardly go out of their way to explain that customers are no longer buying a Compact Disc, is deceptive business practice -- something most countries' consumer laws consider to be an illegal act.
If it's good enough for a pack of cigarettes to carry a large, obvious warning, why can't music disks be tagged in the same way by law. The current fine print that says "Enhanced Audio Disk" or whatever just doesn't cut it.
Maybe if there were one store in this universe that would accept returned CDs, that would work. As it is, you get another copy of the same (crippled) album, or you get escorted out by mall security.
0 1 - just my two bits
Do you believe that the labels and artists are really so clueless that they want copy protection solely as piracy-deterrence?
I'm not buying it. That's just the PR argument.
It's especially true of the type of organized piracy in Brazil that copy protection will do nothing to hinder it. This has been going on for years in many countries, and I simply refuse to believe that the labels really think they can hinder anything other than casual copying.
Remember, the labels are the same people who don't want to respect the first sale doctrine or fair use rights.
I said it before, and I'll say it again - there's nothing wrong with copy-protected CDs - as long as they're clearly labeled as such.
Though I see your point, I have several problems with your conclusion.
Through copyright, record companies have government-granted monopolies. The reason for this is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts." If I cannot play the music, it is not useful. Record companies should have to choose between copyrighting music or releasing it in a copy-protected form. They should not be able to do both.
It's not like truthful labelling of a dishwasher. If the energy usage of a dishwasher you were considering was too high, you could just buy a different one. But music is personal. It stirs the soul. If the song that was playing when you and your wife met is only on a copy-protected CD, what do you do? Pretend you were listening to a different song? If you want the latest Goo Goo Dolls CD and find that it's copy-protected by Warner Brothers, you cannot buy a version that is not from some other label. Truth in advertising is only truly useful when the consumer has a reasonable alternative.
What if I buy a CD and the music falls into the public domain because the copyright expires (It's a theory because, by the time I die, copyright will probably be the life of the creator plus two millenia)? Does the copy protection magically disappear?
Discrimination. The record companies are actively preventing certain consumers from playing the CDs. What they are saying is "we think people with PCs computers steal music, so we will keep this from playing on PCs." It is analogous to deciding that blacks are more likely to shoplift CDs and then engineering the CDs so that they didn't play in a boom box or car stereo (because of the popularity of those devices within the black community).
Fair use. Why should a record company be able to employ a technology specifically to prevent fair use? What right do they have to prevent you, as a consumer, from compressing the music to MP3s, copying it to DAT, or making a copy on your hard drive?
Backup. A CD, like any media, is not impervious to damage. For that reason, people might wish to create backups. I play backups of irreplaceable CDs from my collection. If I cannot back up a CD and it is damaged, how do I replace it? If a sizeable percentage of the price I paid for the CDs paid for a license for me to listen to the music, why should the record company be able to charge me that same license fee again if the CD I originally bought becomes damaged?
I don't believe that this should be a simple truth-in-advertising case. Because of all of the above, it's far more complex than that.
You may try to fake out people with your historical revisionism, but your denial of the on going corporate holocaust is a fraud, as is your obvious lack of any historical knowledge. You may wish that "only" profits are involved, but our basic history as a nation proves otherwise, albeit nowadays it's ignored, and profits at any cost is your mantra. It's one of THE main reasons we had a revolt against england and royal/corporate "rule", ie, it was abusive, and it continues to be abusive to this day.
Here is a simple page explaining some of this fraud
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
Here is a partial paste from that page:
The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations.
We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.
The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck.
The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.
The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.
Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered."
The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.
In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but s
Ahh, but youmiss my point. Cashiers must ring up sales and restock returned items. That's it, no more, no less. Unless they make commission (very doubtful) they don't care if you spend your money. They don't want your money, the store wants your money. They still get paid anyway.
I'm glad some people on here got the point. If you want to make a statement, unless you want it falling on deaf ears, find a manager. I bet the cashier would be more than happy to get one for you.
And if you want to know the honest truth, 9 times out of 10 they will probably side with you; but thae the downside to being powerless, disposable labor is they can't do a thing for you. The only thing that giving them a hard time will do, is make them stop listening.