Sony BMG Settles Over CD DRM

aurispector writes "Sony BMG Music Entertainment will pay $1.5 million and kick in thousands more in customer refunds to settle lawsuits brought by California and Texas over music CDs that installed a hidden anti-piracy program on consumers' computers. The settlements, announced Tuesday, cover lawsuits over CDs loaded with one of two types of copy-protection software — known as MediaMax or XCP. Although it's great to see this as a victory for consumers, I can't help but wonder about the next wave of DRM schemes."

Comments

iTunes is crap.

[fluffy99]

Um, iTunes on the PC has a bad reputation for causing problems. iTunes installs a service that constantly watches the CDRom and USB ports regardless of whether iTunes is actually running. These drivers and hooks are left behind when you uninstall iTunes. Having those drivers still in there makes it impossible to do a repair or in-place upgrade from the CD if Windows gets corrupt. I spent a few hours trying to recover a computer last week and finally had to do some registry crawling to get the remaining iTunes drivers and registry changes out of there.

$175?

[bilbravo]

I don't know what type of "damage" could have been done to these machines. I doubt any hardware was destroyed, and software is simply able to be reinstalled. I think (IMO) that this isn't for "damage", it should be for inconvenience.

That being said, can I just get a refund for the CD? It sucked.