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EFF Pushes Consumers to Claim Rootkit Compensation
An anonymous reader writes "'It's time for music fans who bought Sony BMG CDs loaded with harmful XCP or MediaMax copy protection to claim their settlement benefits', says the EFF's Derek Slater in an awareness campaign that is urging those inflicted with one of Sony BMG's rootkit infected CDs to collect what is due to them. The compensation is a DRM-free version of the original CD, $7.50, and album downloads from iTunes, Sony Connect, and others."
They don't mention it here, but in A civil action, one of the quotes (paraphrasing) is "Corporations say they are sorry by paying money". If a corporation gets away with crap like this without a significant blood letting (law suits), they will try it again soon. It will be a more refined approach, you can be sure. But it will happen again.
Companies who pull this shit need to be punished. Badly. Not a public tounge wagging followed by a pseudo-aplogy. They hire people to do PR and deal with that. When the company's bottom line is hurt, they will be more cautious in the future. And if it takes months or years of cases hanging over their head, the stock will suffer. And when the stock suffers, so do the folks at the top.
Anything else is just the cost of doing business.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Typically the EFF seems to be on the right course but, in this case, the EFF is promoting the idea that a major corporation can force its will on the consumers preemptively and then, when the consumers revolt, all they have to do is say,"Oh. Sorry 'bout that. Here's a lollipop. No go away."
There needs to be a clear signal. What we're seeing here is just a buyout.
The government itself is not stealing your liberties. Their new programs are enabling criminals who will.
This is very small compensation for machines that may have been damaged by this rootkit. Sony should allow people to claim actual damages if people can show that damage has been done.
The best thing that may come out of this is that the rules on what companies can and can't do have been clarified.
If I install software on my machine, I expect it to behave itself, providing I believe that the company itself is reputable. Sony have damaged themselves through this.
-- "It's not stalking if you're married!" My Wife.
To be fair, the DRM on iTunes songs isn't even in the same league as the DRM on the Sony CD in question, let alone the same ballpark - at least it only affects the affected song, and doesn't open the entire PC up to compromise.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The problem is that the typical consumer really has no interest in wasting their time with lawyers, paperwork, and beuracracy.
s _of_Love
Knowing this, is how politics take advantage of the mass consumer thinking.
Days of War, Nights of Love is a collection of political essays which may touch on these ideas:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Days_of_War%2C_Night
True, and at least most everyone knows the iTunes DRM before buying. It's not as bad as someone sneaking some software onto your PC without you knowing.
--
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How many owners keep proof-of-purchase beyond maybe the CD and the little plastic thing it came in? I mean, most of these people could have paid cash, and not kept the receipet.
In a way it's even sneakier though, as it teaches the public that DRM is ok. Just watch how many who otherwise claim to love freedom who readily defends it whenever the issue comes up. As soon as the mindset it firmly in place, there will be no problem rolling out worse and worse protections, until we have "Trusted Computing" telling you exactly where you want to go today.
No thank you.
Spine World
If it were up to them, you wouldn't be allowed to listen to your friend's CD in the first place.
Sue 'em yourself. If you can prove their crap is on your computer, you have proof of damage. Go after them in small claims court. If enough people did the same thing, they'd be hit with too many tiny lawsuits to fight them all.
They didn't tell you or the original owner of the malware on the disk, so they are liable because they were aware of its existence.
i am a soviet space shuttle
"Sony put a virus on one of their music CDs. When you play it, it installs the virus and trashs your PC".
That's how I explained it to Joe sickpack, and it worked perfectly. They hated Sony as much as we do and it's the truth.
Remember "Virus" is a scary word for the uninformed, they think it means "everything gone" or "credit card details stolen". It also does it quick enough for them not to get bored, hence perfect solution and the truth in 1.
I like muppets.
2 Hours of PC repair at $100/hr. per computer affected. It seems reasonable. The average user doesn't have the tools/knowledge to un-root their system, so lets assume they had to pay someone to do it. Time is money anyway, having to spend an afternoon to fix it is worth something.
That would be a painful settlement. How many thousands/millions? of PCs were hit?
a) Find a blank CD (why would I have one around for when I buy my music online anyway?)
To back up your purchase, of course, as anyone with half a brain will do. (What do you think Apple is going to say when your hard drive crashes and you come crawling to them for permission to re-download all your iTunes purchases?)
b) Encode using a highly compressed source
Which I guarantee you don't notice when you listen to the music. If you could hear artifacts from 128K AAC-compressed tracks, you wouldn't want to use iTunes in the first place, DRM or none.
... EFF Finally Sells Out.
I would think they would be encouraging victims to withdraw from the class action. Maybe the victims who did so would get nothing (as opposed to next-to-nothing), but every victim who withdrew from the class would cost the lawyers who agreed to this worthless settlement a little bit of their fee.
Not only does the agreement not compensate the victims for real damages ($7.50 is what, 10 minutes of tech support?), but contains no punitive damages. Let's not forget that Sony didn't just use DRM, they infected their victims computers with a virus, stole personal information, opened up their computers to further attacks, and then took deliberate actions to cover up their wrongdoing. If you or I did that, we'd be facing jail time.
The EFF gets their legal fees compensated, and I'm sure their hourly rates are of generous size by the standards of most IT workers. Sony did get off fairly cheaply. But in many class action suits involving low-ticket products, the law firm(s) representing the plaintiffs walk away with 40 percent of the pot while the consumers get peanuts, and the company does no worse than Sony did. The whole thing is basically a big reward for the law firm that filed the claim first. Here, we still get peanuts, and I personally don't intend to file a claim, but it probably wasn't a financial windfall for the EFF - just a nice little project for them.
I don't see a single thing in this settlement that punishes Sony sufficiently to absolutely convince them to never even think of attempting this again.
Worse yet, I don't see anything here to scare off any other big music or movie company from trying the same thing.
Sony should have gone down big time over this one.
And the lawyers should have only gotten a replacement CD and 3 free downloads as well.
Are there still any other suits in any other state/countries pending that will hurt them more?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
As you say, I have merely bought the right to listen to the music, not the music itself. That raises two points:
1) Unless otherwise clearly informed of the fact at the time of purchase, I have bought the licence in perpetutiy, not for a limited time - I do not expect to lose access simply because the company goes belly-up and the DRM prevents me from accessing it.
2) If I have bought the right to listen to the music, then I should be allowed to replace it if lost, stolen, destroyed or otherwise unusable to me for a nominal replacement fee. I should not be forced to buy a new CD at full retail simply because my daughter broke the old one.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
But as the EFF pointed out, those in the first category can opt out of the settlement and sue on their own dime
But, what the EFF said was:
First, you understand that the settlement *preserves* the claims of folks who have hardware damage due to the rootkit, right? They can still sue to get more and we're happy to help. The scope of the settlement is for a different harm -- the harm of merely having bought these bad CDs.
That means that the lawsuit applies only to buying the DRM'd CD. It has nothing to do installing it, nor the damage done by it. You can collect on the current class action for having bought one of the CDs, and still be able to sue or join a second class action for damages caused by the CDs. Which is pretty darn cool, IMHO. It means this lawsuit actually has a VERY reasonable settlement value. You bought a DRM'd CD, you get a free non-DRM'd CD, plus $7.50, plus some free downloads. Not bad, if you ask me. Oh, the damage it did to your machine by installing it? Well, as they say, that's a whole different lawsuit. And inclusion in this class does NOT exclude you from the other. You don't have to opt out if it to get damages for the DRM hosing your system.
(All that assumes what the EFF said was true, of course...)
WWJD?
JWRTFM!
I'd argue that in some ways, the iTunes DRM is worse. At least with the Sony CDs, the DRM stayed the same. Apple has changed what you can do with the music AFTER you have purchased it.
Apple has changed the number of CDs you can burn it to, and the number of computers you can have the music on at the same time. Apple also force upgrades by requiring new software for new model iPods, so not updating iTunes isn't a viable way of escaping changes in the DRM permissions.
If Apple ever decided to build backdoors into iTunes, people would still have no choice but to upgrade and have all the backdoors affect all of their music, if they want iTunes to work with their latest iPod... or if they chose not to buy the latest iPod because of the backdoors, they would lose the ability to play all of their music on-the-go, since the music can't be played on any competing MP3 players.
Not as far as I can tell it isn't. Most CDs say somewhere on the case something along the lines of "no unauthorised copying, hiring, lending, reproduction, public performance or broadcasting of the work". If I was the actual owner of the music that I'd just purchased, why is anyone else able to put those restrictions on what I do with it?
If I buy a bottle of Coke, I'm not told that I wouldn't be allowed to serve it at a public gathering, or let my friends have some of it, would I? In that instance I own the Coke in that bottle to do with pretty much as I see fit.