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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.
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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.
If it were up to them, you wouldn't be allowed to listen to your friend's CD in the first place.
In a way it's even sneakier though, as it teaches the public that DRM is ok.
Because people knowing about a fair(er) form of DRM and agreeing with it is SO evil.
iTunes' DRM is very acceptable to most people, as its limits aren't very strict, and it only applies to music. Trusted Computing or whatever bollocks they call it now isn't in the same ballpark.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
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?
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.