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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
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.
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 it were up to them, you wouldn't be allowed to listen to your friend's CD in the first place.