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California Class Action Suit Sony Over Rootkit DRM
carre4 writes "Lawyers in California have filed a class-action lawsuit against Sony and a second one may be filed today in New York. The lawsuit was filed Nov. 1 in Superior Court for the County of Los Angeles by Vernon, CA attorney Alan Himmelfarb. It asks the court to prevent Sony from selling additional CDs protected by the anti-piracy software, and seeks monetary damages for California consumers who purchased them. The suit alleges that Sony's software violates at least three California statutes, including the "Consumer Legal Remedies Act," which governs unfair and/or deceptive trade acts; and the "Consumer Protection against Computer Spyware Act," which prohibits -- among other things -- software that takes control over the user's computer or misrepresents the user's ability or right to uninstall the program. The suit also alleges that Sony's actions violate the California Unfair Competition law,
which allows public prosecutors and private citizens to file lawsuits
to protect businesses and consumers from unfair business practices. EFF has released a list of rootkit affected CD's and Slashdot user xtracto also has a list."
The man is sticking it to the man!
Just rename your emailed copy of the lawsuit to $sys$lawsuit.pdf and it will disappear!
You can piss off the consumers, the college kids, the geeks, the nerds, the haxx0rs, the artists, and even other people in the industry itself... but when you put that crap on a country CD, you just know some politician is going to buy it, and then you're screwed.
My script don't crash! She crashes, you crashed her!
From the list of Infected CDs:
Our Lady Peace, Healthy in Paranoid Times
Hrmmm....
I mean, come on, Sony! Celine Dion? Neil Diamond? Ricky Martin??
If you were really serious about XCP as a means to prevent illicit copying, in order to protect your revenue, how about applying it to music that people would want to download?
- DRM rootkit to stop piracy: $50,000,000
- Patch to water-down DRM rootkit: $5,000,000
- Top notch lawyers to sue pirates: $100,000,000
- Being sued by the only legitimate users you have: Priceless.
There are some thought processes money can't buy. For everything else there's MasterTard (tm).
$sys$woohoo... ;-)
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
"I bought the "DualDisc" version of the Trey Anastasio CD they show in the EFF write-up. Every time I put it in my 10 year old Sony CD player, it makes a horrible racket."
Funny, same thing happens when my wife plays the Celine Dion CD. But I think in my case, the horrible racket is the intended output.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I think you just answered your own question.
I believe the term is "exculpatory", and the way my legal environment professor explained it was this: "If clauses like that worked, we'd all be driving around with signs on the front of our cars that say, 'Not responsible if I hit you'." (IANAL, of course.)
So what your telling me is that my bumper sticker that says "If you can read this I'm about to lock my brakes" won't shield me from legal liability?
God damn it!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Such splendid use of the word "CAPITALism" =)
If there is one thing to be learned on slashdot, it has to be sarcasm.
...as they have renamed themselves to $sys$Sony...
I once had to hack together a TOS/EULA for a small net company. I really wanted to stick "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US" in there but I chickened out. Its too bad, I later found out that that is something people do. From Blogger's TOS:
(e) IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR THEN YOUR EYES PROBABLY HURT. ALL CAPS, WHAT WERE WE THINKING? HOWEVER, WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR THIS OR ANY OTHER OCULAR MALADY.
They have the balls I didn't.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Why not record a bunch of crappy songs, burn them on a CD and send them for review to SONY. And, of course, just to make sure they don't copy it illegally, let's fill the CD with our OWN rootkit/spyware/phone-home/whatever! Let 'em have it! And a EULA the size of the yellow pages...