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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."
is a DRM-free version of the original CD, $7.50, and album downloads from iTunes, Sony Connect, and others.
Should read:
is a DRM-free version of the original CD, $7.50, and DRM-laden album downloads from iTunes, Sony Connect, and others.
I'd also like to know if anyone is going to try for a real settlement - like a company having to audit their network after finding one PC rooted.
My pics.
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.
That doesn't seem fair. One CD could have infected multiple machines, but only the original owner gets "compensated" by Sony.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
I'm not sure about this. Here it costs at least 40/hour to have a decent engineer come over and reinstall windows, back up your data and restore the machine to working condition. Taking the settlement Sony offer might prejudice getting a proper settlement, which I estimate at between 60-80 per affected user.
Thats's the civil liability. Here in the UK what Sony have done is a *criminal* offence under the computer misuse act.
I hope we haven't even started to see the scale of damage this is going to cost Sony. Frankly I hope it bankrupts them.
If some 14 year old kid wrote this rootkit he would be staring at 10 years in jail.
who decided that a free album was appropriate compensation? How about the cost to archive all important files and reinstall the afflicted OS at the very least. They could forgo the time lost without a shitted on computer
This will like set an important precedent w.r.t. rootkits and other commercial malware (Starforce anyone?). I only hope the result will be good for the customer and not the corporations. If Sony don't get the punishment they deserve for this, everyone else will jump on the bandwagon.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
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
I never bought one of these. Instead, I suffered at the office as the IT guy who had to clean up the mess that Sony left behind. I would like to sue them for the labor, time and frustration they caused... and continue to cause! Those things are still out there drifting about. Just last week I had to reverse the damage one of those CDs caused. A real pain in the ass it is. So far, that makes over 10 machines trashed because of that stupid crap.
And the "real" punishment, as far as I'm concerned, is that I had the opportunity to explain to a lay-person what Sony has done, why they did it and why they shouldn't trust Sony with their dollars ever again. I truly think it's a powerful thing since these people found out first-hand that it wasn't "their fault" and that trusting a big company like Sony to always do the right thing is pretty wrong. The opinion these people, and those they that hear their story, hold of a much lower opinion of Sony than they once did.
May Sony feel the wrath of the consumer!!
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
Greetings,
.org
I just read on your website where the EFF has agreed to settle with Sony BMG.
What a pathetic settlement that does nothing to assist consumers with the costs of removing the rootkit software and in addition, fails to act as any sort of a deterrent to Sony BMG.
Way to knuckle under for the little guy.
Unhappy in California
Hi ,
I'm sorry you feel that way and there may be nothing I can do to
convince you otherwise, since I understand some people want Sony
BMG's head on a pike and nothing less will do. I don't necessarily
disagree, but the law limits what we can get in the context of a
class action settlement. But I hope you'll at least give me a hearing.
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.
The main reason that we didn't settle those claims is that we haven't
had enough people come forward with proof that the CDs harmed their
computers to constitute a sufficient number for a class action. Class
actions require "numerousity" and "uniformity" of claims. If you
know of such people, please send them our way. They can bring small
claims actions. If we do discover enough folks with a common pattern
of harm, we will consider another class action.
Second, as for whether this will serve as a deterrent to Sony in the
future, I guess we'll see in time. Even if we had taken the case all
the way through to a trial and been completely successful, a court
would not be able to order Sony to cease using all DRM under current
law. So as much as I'd like to see Sony do that, this case alone was
never going to accomplish that goal.
Right now they have stopped pressing *any* CDs with DRM on them,
agreed to independent review of any future DRM (with a report to the
lawyers involved in the case), and agreed to allow non-DRM/non-EULA
versions of all of the music that was affected by the bad DRM. The
cash cost of the settlement is hard to value but Sony says that the
value of album downloads are $10 per album. If the 5 million people
affected by MediaMax get a free album download that's a cost of $50
million to Sony. That's before the $7.50 per album for the 3 million
XCP users and the extra downloads that they get, or the replacement
music for the MediaMax 3 users.
While the settlement terms are the product of negotiation and so
aren't perfect, I do think we got a good deal in the settlement for
purchasers of the CDs. Believe me it was hard fought and there is
much in there now that Sony started out by flatly rejecting. I
certainly understand if you disagree and want to try for more on your
own. You absolutely have the right to opt-out of the settlement and
bring your own action. I'd be very curious to hear how that goes if
you choose to do it.
Most important for us was:
1. stop production of any more CDs with the dangerous DRM on it.
2. get people non-DRM'd/non-EULA'd versions of their music (this was
strongly resisted by Sony)
3. do it quickly
4. get people some free music (or in the case of XCP, money) for
their trouble.
There's much more in the settlement than that, of course, but for the
purchasers these were the core goals.
Again, I appreciate your feedback.
- Show quoted text -
On wrote:
----
---- www.eff.org
Electronic Frontier Foundation
454 Shotwell Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 436-9333 x
If you want more blood out of sony here you go.... Nothing at all stopping you
from taking them to small claims court and getting what you deserve. Most small claims courts have a very small fee like $10 for filing, 5 minutes in front of a judge and bingo you have got cash!
* damage to a computer or network resulting from interactions between the XCP Software or the MediaMax Software and your computer (e.g., damage to your hard drive);
* damage related to your reasonable efforts to remove the XCP Software or the MediaMax Software; or
* copyright, trademark or other claims arising from the development of the MediaMax Software or the XCP Software, or any uninstallers or updates thereto.
You may still sue Sony BMG for any such claims, whether or not you choose to take advantage of the settlement benefits. As part of the settlement process, Sony BMG agreed to waive its overreaching New York forum selection clause and $5 limit on damages, so you can take them to your local small claims court for your damages.
See here for more information about the small claims process.
Got Code?
The settlement was a joke (sorry EFF). What kind of message is that - the typical guy who installs malware/spyware on a computer is fined heavily and sometimes goes to jail, while a big corporation Sony gets away with a ridiculous amount of cash per malevolent action? Where's the justice in that?
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Don't forget -- claims MUST BE submitted by December 31, 2006. If you want to be excluded from the settlement, you MUST FILE before May 1, 2006. If you do not exclude yourself, you can attend the fairness hearing, at your own expense, and be heard by yourself or through your attorney.
I run the SonySuit.com website an plan to start collecting messages about the settlement to submit to the court as exhibits to my statement at the fairness hearing. If you have a comment about the settlement, send it to sonysuit@gmail.com.
-- Mark Lyon http://www.marklyon.org
Can I please pay by paypal the next time I install a rootkit on one of Sony's workstations? $7,50 each, right? They pick some stuff from my mp3 collection too, if they want.
Don't you people realize that this so-called "settlement" is just a trick to enable the courts to collect the names and addresses of people who listen to creatively bland corporate musick?!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
exert...
Why does EFF think the settlement is a good deal for purchasers of the Sony BMG CDs?
EFF agreed to the settlement because we believe it provides a good compensation package for the group of people who purchased the CDs but did not experience any hardware damage as a result. This means purchasers whose claim is primarily based on their purchase of the CDs and experiencing the hassle of having to patch or uninstall their systems, or in the case of MediaMax 3, having had files installed prior to giving you a chance to agree.
EFF's goals for purchasers of the CDs were to :
There's much more in the settlement than that, of course, but for the purchasers these were EFF's core goals and the settlement meets them all. That's why we think the settlement is a good deal and we endorse it.
... 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.
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."
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.
Any time spent removing the rootkit, your privacy, risk of viruses, accidental data loss due to having to format your PC is worth 7 and half bucks and a few shitty songs that costs them next to nothing to distribute digitally. Gotta love lobbyists.
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