No, no it's not. It doesn't matter whether there's just one or a thousand copies. Taking something you're not entitled to is stealing ("to take possessions of others without permission or right;" "to appropriate without acknowledgment or right;" "the act of taking unlawfully" for some dictionary examples). Theft is a legal term which requires the perpetrator to deprive the owner, which is what you may be thinking of. Stealing, however, is just taking the possessions of another without permission. You also don't have to care about it for it to be stealing.
If I have a truckload of rocks delivered to my driveway for landscaping, and you take one as you walk by, you've stolen it. I might not notice that it's gone, and I wouldn't even care. But stealing is stealing no matter what moral color you put on it. You might say that taking an apple to feed a starving child is justified (and I'd tend to agree), but it absolutely still is stealing (even if there are an effectively infinite number of apples, since the tree will always grow more).
It was not my intent to connect the two. Perhaps that isn't as clear as I'd hoped it would be.
Instead, it was merely a threshold comparison. If people don't care about much larger and more pressing issues (e.g. the war, civil liberties, our reprehensible education system), then something several orders of magnitude more trivial would naturally be at least as unimportant and should be expected to be met with the same (or greater) level of apathy.
Ignorant is not a synonym for apathetic. You keep throwing around "ignorant" but nobody said it once until you brought your indignant tirade here. "Fighting the man" also has fuck-all to do with anything mentioned here, nor does stupidity of Americans or conspiracy theories. You're talking out your ass based on emotion and not even a hint of logic or reasoning and digging a bigger and bigger hole.
I know, I know. It's hard when you fail at logic while trying to make a point, but maybe you should choose your battles more carefully. I don't recall talking about scum at any point, but please feel free to go on being insulted about your stupidity, ignorance, and newfound "scum" status that you've piled upon yourself. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will wonder why you've decided that I'm some sort of hippie, conspiracy wingnut student (again pulled from thin air like everything else you've said). I'll happily admit to being superior when faced with obtuse fools.
Those don't seem to be indie bands struggling to make it and having to keep putting out material so people don't forget them--many of those face a tough choice whether to release EPs or wait until they have a full album's worth of material (given the production costs and need to keep mindshare). The small indie bands are the topic of discussion, not the greedy infomercial collections.
To most people, choosing a web browser for ideological reasons is like choosing a brand of peanut butter for ideological reasons--it's possible but no one really cares enough to do it It doesn't have anything to do with "ideological reason"--it has to do with "choosing." Uptake is lower because people don't care, not because people tried both and decided they preferred IE at much higher rates.
People in Finland aren't activists or shills. They tried Firefox and liked it. Just like in my house, there are people who like Jif and people who like Skippy. They know their preference, but they won't be starting blogs or writing sixteen-page treatises on it. The children made a choice and can indicate a preference.
People in the US on the whole simply don't care as much. I'm not saying that they should give a crap about web browsers; but if they don't care about more important things, why should they be expected to care about less important ones?
Where do you get the impression that I prefer or even *use* Firefox? (I don't.)
And I think you're not so clear on what "ignorant" means...but thanks for illustrating the exact cause-and-effect disjoint I mentioned in my first post. Lack of interest in choice is what we like to call an "effect," not a "cause." Belief that having an interest and choice requires you to be an activist or an ideologue is what we call a "false dilemma."
Congratulations for being a case study. Bonus points if you're not American.
Maybe you two can be friends in remedial English, then. Stealing != theft. Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing (taking something to which you have zero entitlement) but that does not mean it is theft.
If you want to play the definition game, at least do it right.
Well certainly part of it is that smaller labels (which charge less) are still able to put out vinyl records inexpensively. However, CD pressing is also quite affordable, so the difference is largely based on pragmatics more so than economics directly. It may well be, however, that releasing EPs is easier and more guilt-free than releasing a 35-minute album on CD. I really can't imagine anyone balking at the price of a low-run CD release from the CD-equivalent of a print shop and running to a vinyl repro, which can't possibly be much cheaper.
Persistent analog storage may be best, but consumer analog formats aren't. "Archival vinyl" is an oxymoron unless you never play the album.
If records really want to make a comeback, they'll come up with a nondestructive way to read the disc, like a laser beam. Oops, they did that. It's called a CD.
I agree that high quality analog recordings are a good thing to keep around for posterity, but analog recordings certainly aren't better for home reproduction (they'll get a little worse every time you play them), unless you don't mind having to repurchase albums every so often. You don't need DRM when your recording format expires and can't be reproduced easily at home. There is, after all, no "vinyl burner" on the shelf at Best Buy for $40.
It also "made a comeback" in 2000 or so when lots of indie bands started copying the older indie bands who had released both on vinyl and CD (e.g. Death Cab). Vinyl became an indie scene "gold card." It had as much to do with nostalgia as it did with any particular technical reason (vinyl also has the benefit of wearing out and making you have to re-purchase albums periodically).
Hence the PERMANENT link. Unless Wikipedia shuts down entirely, that link will always point to the content of the page at the time it was retrieved. On the other hand, why you'd want to cite Wikipedia content (except to mock a particularly juicy block of prose) is beyond me.
MLA and APA citations are worthless (even with the date) if you have no way of accessing the content as it was originally displayed. Who cares that you claim you accessed it on December 6th if it's now April and the site doesn't keep its history like Wikipedia does? You have no way of knowing what the December 6th content was or whether the author used it properly.
It's not a trolling post just because you don't like it or because you don't understand it.
Complacency and apathy is exactly the sort of reason why Microsoft still commands the desktop and why people aren't switching over to superior products like Firefox. It's also the reason why alternative fuels are struggling to take off (fossil fuels are still profitable for producers and cheap for consumers) and why it takes near-catastrophe for the United States to enact appropriate social and environmental policy.
Since I am an American, you can take your indignation at my criticism and shove it.
You think a country full of people who don't care about an illegal war in Iraq, the abuse of our rights at the (blatant and unveiled!) hands of our president, or any apparent concern for the finer points of logic and reasoning would actually give a crap about what browser they use?
Their computers come with Internet Explorer, and it's good enough. They're not going to embrace Firefox just for the sake of it, because they're entirely apathetic about almost everything to begin with.
We Americans haven't had to fight for anything or even really compete. Students don't have to learn, and people readily embrace each other when a Wikipedia link makes them think they're experts on legal and business processes (*cough*implied warranties*cough*). Complacency explains a lot, including the relatively slower uptake of Firefox.
Unless flash memory has had a number of functional improvements I'm not aware of, they will not EFFECT anything.
But if you're asking whether they will affect size or battery life, the answer is no. Robson caching will, however, allow the hard drive greater downtime, which in turn will extend battery life, lower internal temperature (because the hard drive will not have to spin up as often), and therefore further (marginally) improve battery life in a second way thanks to lower cooling system demands and better battery temperatures.
I can't imagine a scenario where Robson caching is unavoidable. If the flash fails, you simply no longer have use of that feature. AFAIK, the operating system of your choice has to PUT data into the cache; the system doesn't know what to put in there all by itself. With that in mind, I'd imagine that just turning it off via a control panel in Windows or a preference pane in OS X would do the trick.
You're allowed to watch and buy these DVDs, too, unless you have some sort of Cylon module in your head that makes you somehow incapable of buying movies rated higher than PG.
RTFA. All they're talking about are *film censors* and not just banning movies willy-nilly. You can still buy them; they are just arguing that they should have been given higher ratings.
I didn't know they were V-chipping people these days. Makes sense, I guess, since Slashdotters have been having their brain bandwidth throttled for some time now.
It is trivial to demonstrate that these "DVDs" don't work as promised by simply putting them into a DVD player and atttempting to play them .
Problem being that most DVD players will play these discs just fine according to TFA. Ergo, the obvious conclusion is that the player is defective. This would not be accurate however, as Sony deliberately changed the copy protection and left some player products out of the loop.
The store failed their end - they gave you a product which doesn't work as promised Where is the promise that the disc will work on all players, and where is the authoritative proof that your player isn't the problem, and not the disc? I have an old DVD player that doesn't handle dual-layer discs very well (and often not at all), but if I didn't know that, I'd wrongly assume the DVD was broken. Since the DVD logo itself is meaningless, and since it is a software product with extreme difficulty to determine problems given that they are not primarily physical, it's quite hard to demonstrate that a properly pressed disc is not "fit for purpose" since there is no guiding standard outlining the purpose. Customer assumption is not a legal defence prima facie.
Your ability to return a defective DVD is firmly rooted in consumer protection laws as well as contractual laws. It is not a gracious courtesy from the stores part, but a legal obligation underlaying the whole economy That is not the issue. The issue is that the determination of its status as "defective" has not been made, and since it is a legal status, customer perception is not authoritative. If a given software application does not work on your system, even though it meets the minimum requirements on the box, your right to redress is with the software manufacturer. The retailer does not guarantee the function of software and no court has held that it is responsible to do so. The retailer's warranty of merchantability extends only to specify that the product meets the manufacturer specifications. The warranty of fitness extends only as far to deliver a functional disc containing all of the data required of it. Neither software bugs nor DRM problems are retailer/merchant liabilities.
This is a fundamental distinction which Slashdotters seem wholly unable to grasp.
They haven't sold you anything, so they aren't under any obligation to take any action on your behalf; they have no contract with you. The dispute is not contractual in nature; this comment of yours is non sequitur. The claim of misrepresentation and failure to disclose limitations are the purview of advertising and marketing and not of contracts. The disc fully conforms to the DVD format (the disc type and laser response); there is no DVD specification requirement that these discs do not meet. They do have DVD video (VOB/MPEG2+AC3/PCM) content, and there is no prohibition against copy protection or even machine-specific DRM in the standard. There is no DVD "red book" and no way to argue that the disc is not fit for purpose as a DVD disc (since DVD standards only specify laser response and data structure). The only relevant claims are misrepresentation of product and failure to disclose limitations not apparent.
According to TFA, all they're talking about is changing the designation of films from PG to higher ratings by the *film censors* and not about banning the film from sale or distribution or anything of the sort. The proposed bill would simply require certain topics to have higher censor ratings.
It's not trolling in the least. I didn't say it was the customer's problem entirely--I said it is no more the retailer's problem than the customer's, and it's not fair to force the retailer to accept the loss because you, the customer, aren't willing to do any of the legwork. Someone needs to deal with Sony, and that means a CUSTOMER needs to step up to the plate and sue. Retailers don't have any stake in the issue and don't make a convincing plaintiff. The retailers aren't the ones advertising DVD compatibility, not that there even is such a thing (the DVD logo is meaningless). The customers are the ones demanding Sony products, even though they have serious problems. The customers are the ones encountering difficulty with Sony products not working as they expect. Sony is the one making the misleading claim.
I swear to Aisha it's not that hard to understand that Sony is the legally liable party. Remember the rootkits? Same deal. Contaminated dog food? Not Petsmart's legal problem. Faulty TurboTax software? Not OfficeMax's responsibility. Failure of hydraulic jack to hold the advertised 2000 pounds, breaking your car? You won't win any money in a suit against Autozone, unless it's a store brand jack.
If you bought one of these DVDs unwittingly and it doesn't work, return it. But don't buy all the DVDs you can find, rip them all, and return them all just because you're having a little tantrum. All that does is make money for Sony and leave retailers with a gaping hole in the cash registers. It's the pump and dump scheme (at the top of this thread) that is reprehensible. It's exploitation of customer service and retailers at their expense, and it doesn't do anything to Sony's bottom line except make it bigger.
Walmart is the 10,000 pound gorilla. No other retailer has the clout that Walmart does, and even large chains like Target and Best Buy would need a massive media campaign to have any sort of effective leverage.
Of course the retailer is going to accept the return--it's good customer service to do so, and however much people like to bitch, stores are remarkably flexible about accepting returns. My point is that the retailer is doing this in good faith and shouldn't be the one victimized by a pump and dump scheme as advocated by the OP.
If you bought one of these discs and found it didn't play, certainly returning it would be one appropriate choice to make (but not ripping it, since you want your money back for not being able to make use of the disc). However, advocating a scheme to go out and buy these products, rip them "on principle" and then dump the pile back at retailers' feet is targeting the wrong party. Retailers are almost never reimbursed for open stock software of any kind--which is why most of them won't accept it generally (they only get money for damaged discs and mis-pressed ones). That's a reality of retail. They'll never make that money back, and customers demand to have the product available (and high initial sales will drive increased orders for the product, because the returned discs can't be put back on the shelves, and empty shelves need to be filled, creating a massive revenue stream for Sony).
No, I'm saying it's inefficient to pressure retailers to correct something disliked about a product vis-a-vis buying the product anyway, and then returning it to the retailer.
It's not the same as something that is plainly and physically broken, which is easily reimbursed. When you have problems with software, you go to the manufacturer. That's the way the digital marketplace was set up (with good reason; retailers and distributors have jack-shit to do with the performance, compatibility, or operation of software and have no capacity to do any sort of testing to defend that guarantee).
If the product is purchased, the manufacturer is paid. If it is returned, the manufacturer does not reimburse for software products, except for mis-pressed or damaged discs. That's why almost no one takes flat-out returns of opened software (this policy predates the piracy scare)--because the retailers have no hope of recouping the loss, and no option not to carry audio CDs, DVDs, and/or software when they have invested in providing those services. Yes, if all the manufacturers band together, they can get Sony to label these DVDs or they can even choose to label them at the stores--but that process takes several weeks and a lot of talks with legal (because the store can't label the discs until it has been demonstrated that it's not a player problem [even though we know it's not]).
Write to Sony, sue Sony, send the disc back to Sony. But advocating *buying* discs in large numbers and then dumping them back on retailers as the OP did only generates more money for Sony, however well-intentioned the idea is.
Precisely. The problem is that these DVDs *do* work for most people, and that the suggestion that started this thread does not treat the problem--customers shouldn't buy Sony DVDs at all if they want to send a message. Buying them and then returning them doesn't guarantee any sort of financial impact on Sony and doesn't motivate them to change. Low first-time sales is the only vector which provides leverage against these bullshit decisions of Sony.
I'm sorry Slashdot moderators and posters don't understand implied warranties, but what I'm saying is not particularly hard to comprehend. Absent a court or regulatory order, nothing is making Sony pay for these returns. Buying and returning them still expands Sony's revenue, so Sony is still going to do it. Customers, further, are returning the discs claiming they aren't "fit for purpose" even though the only reason they make this claim is that they have a DVD logo on them (a logo which has absolutely no meaning to it aside from identifying the disc format--the DVD logo is carried on software titles, proprietary data discs, and video discs with and without copy protection and even machine-specific DRM). It is a faulty customer assumption that the DVD logo means that it plays in a consumer DVD machine, plain and simple.
Yes, that is a reasonable assumption for a customer to make. No, it is not a warranty of fitness issue, and no, the merchant is not the responsible party. It is a misrepresentation claim, and Sony is indeed liable and responsible and should be taken to task. That's all I'm saying.
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No, no it's not. It doesn't matter whether there's just one or a thousand copies. Taking something you're not entitled to is stealing ("to take possessions of others without permission or right;" "to appropriate without acknowledgment or right;" "the act of taking unlawfully" for some dictionary examples). Theft is a legal term which requires the perpetrator to deprive the owner, which is what you may be thinking of. Stealing, however, is just taking the possessions of another without permission. You also don't have to care about it for it to be stealing.
If I have a truckload of rocks delivered to my driveway for landscaping, and you take one as you walk by, you've stolen it. I might not notice that it's gone, and I wouldn't even care. But stealing is stealing no matter what moral color you put on it. You might say that taking an apple to feed a starving child is justified (and I'd tend to agree), but it absolutely still is stealing (even if there are an effectively infinite number of apples, since the tree will always grow more).
It was not my intent to connect the two. Perhaps that isn't as clear as I'd hoped it would be.
Instead, it was merely a threshold comparison. If people don't care about much larger and more pressing issues (e.g. the war, civil liberties, our reprehensible education system), then something several orders of magnitude more trivial would naturally be at least as unimportant and should be expected to be met with the same (or greater) level of apathy.
Ignorant is not a synonym for apathetic. You keep throwing around "ignorant" but nobody said it once until you brought your indignant tirade here. "Fighting the man" also has fuck-all to do with anything mentioned here, nor does stupidity of Americans or conspiracy theories. You're talking out your ass based on emotion and not even a hint of logic or reasoning and digging a bigger and bigger hole.
I know, I know. It's hard when you fail at logic while trying to make a point, but maybe you should choose your battles more carefully. I don't recall talking about scum at any point, but please feel free to go on being insulted about your stupidity, ignorance, and newfound "scum" status that you've piled upon yourself. Meanwhile, the rest of the world will wonder why you've decided that I'm some sort of hippie, conspiracy wingnut student (again pulled from thin air like everything else you've said). I'll happily admit to being superior when faced with obtuse fools.
PS. It's "ridiculous" with an I.
Those don't seem to be indie bands struggling to make it and having to keep putting out material so people don't forget them--many of those face a tough choice whether to release EPs or wait until they have a full album's worth of material (given the production costs and need to keep mindshare). The small indie bands are the topic of discussion, not the greedy infomercial collections.
People in Finland aren't activists or shills. They tried Firefox and liked it. Just like in my house, there are people who like Jif and people who like Skippy. They know their preference, but they won't be starting blogs or writing sixteen-page treatises on it. The children made a choice and can indicate a preference.
People in the US on the whole simply don't care as much. I'm not saying that they should give a crap about web browsers; but if they don't care about more important things, why should they be expected to care about less important ones?
Where do you get the impression that I prefer or even *use* Firefox? (I don't.)
And I think you're not so clear on what "ignorant" means...but thanks for illustrating the exact cause-and-effect disjoint I mentioned in my first post. Lack of interest in choice is what we like to call an "effect," not a "cause." Belief that having an interest and choice requires you to be an activist or an ideologue is what we call a "false dilemma."
Congratulations for being a case study. Bonus points if you're not American.
Not for audio. Laserdisc audio is digital like CDs (or was, rather, on my Laserdisc collection). Yes, I will admit to having owned a VDP :).
Maybe you two can be friends in remedial English, then. Stealing != theft. Copyright infringement most certainly is stealing (taking something to which you have zero entitlement) but that does not mean it is theft.
If you want to play the definition game, at least do it right.
Well certainly part of it is that smaller labels (which charge less) are still able to put out vinyl records inexpensively. However, CD pressing is also quite affordable, so the difference is largely based on pragmatics more so than economics directly. It may well be, however, that releasing EPs is easier and more guilt-free than releasing a 35-minute album on CD. I really can't imagine anyone balking at the price of a low-run CD release from the CD-equivalent of a print shop and running to a vinyl repro, which can't possibly be much cheaper.
Because Microsoft is evil and Americans are flawless, of course. We must find a way to reconcile the two! The numbers must be lying!
:)
Incidentally, I mainly replied to smile at your division of people into geeks v. civilians.
Persistent analog storage may be best, but consumer analog formats aren't. "Archival vinyl" is an oxymoron unless you never play the album.
If records really want to make a comeback, they'll come up with a nondestructive way to read the disc, like a laser beam. Oops, they did that. It's called a CD.
I agree that high quality analog recordings are a good thing to keep around for posterity, but analog recordings certainly aren't better for home reproduction (they'll get a little worse every time you play them), unless you don't mind having to repurchase albums every so often. You don't need DRM when your recording format expires and can't be reproduced easily at home. There is, after all, no "vinyl burner" on the shelf at Best Buy for $40.
It also "made a comeback" in 2000 or so when lots of indie bands started copying the older indie bands who had released both on vinyl and CD (e.g. Death Cab). Vinyl became an indie scene "gold card." It had as much to do with nostalgia as it did with any particular technical reason (vinyl also has the benefit of wearing out and making you have to re-purchase albums periodically).
Hence the PERMANENT link. Unless Wikipedia shuts down entirely, that link will always point to the content of the page at the time it was retrieved. On the other hand, why you'd want to cite Wikipedia content (except to mock a particularly juicy block of prose) is beyond me.
MLA and APA citations are worthless (even with the date) if you have no way of accessing the content as it was originally displayed. Who cares that you claim you accessed it on December 6th if it's now April and the site doesn't keep its history like Wikipedia does? You have no way of knowing what the December 6th content was or whether the author used it properly.
And yet the moderators love it as though they've recently overcome an allergy to low-grade seafood.
It's not a trolling post just because you don't like it or because you don't understand it.
Complacency and apathy is exactly the sort of reason why Microsoft still commands the desktop and why people aren't switching over to superior products like Firefox. It's also the reason why alternative fuels are struggling to take off (fossil fuels are still profitable for producers and cheap for consumers) and why it takes near-catastrophe for the United States to enact appropriate social and environmental policy.
Since I am an American, you can take your indignation at my criticism and shove it.
You think a country full of people who don't care about an illegal war in Iraq, the abuse of our rights at the (blatant and unveiled!) hands of our president, or any apparent concern for the finer points of logic and reasoning would actually give a crap about what browser they use?
Their computers come with Internet Explorer, and it's good enough. They're not going to embrace Firefox just for the sake of it, because they're entirely apathetic about almost everything to begin with.
We Americans haven't had to fight for anything or even really compete. Students don't have to learn, and people readily embrace each other when a Wikipedia link makes them think they're experts on legal and business processes (*cough*implied warranties*cough*). Complacency explains a lot, including the relatively slower uptake of Firefox.
Unless flash memory has had a number of functional improvements I'm not aware of, they will not EFFECT anything.
But if you're asking whether they will affect size or battery life, the answer is no. Robson caching will, however, allow the hard drive greater downtime, which in turn will extend battery life, lower internal temperature (because the hard drive will not have to spin up as often), and therefore further (marginally) improve battery life in a second way thanks to lower cooling system demands and better battery temperatures.
I can't imagine a scenario where Robson caching is unavoidable. If the flash fails, you simply no longer have use of that feature. AFAIK, the operating system of your choice has to PUT data into the cache; the system doesn't know what to put in there all by itself. With that in mind, I'd imagine that just turning it off via a control panel in Windows or a preference pane in OS X would do the trick.
You're allowed to watch and buy these DVDs, too, unless you have some sort of Cylon module in your head that makes you somehow incapable of buying movies rated higher than PG.
RTFA. All they're talking about are *film censors* and not just banning movies willy-nilly. You can still buy them; they are just arguing that they should have been given higher ratings.
I didn't know they were V-chipping people these days. Makes sense, I guess, since Slashdotters have been having their brain bandwidth throttled for some time now.
That is not the issue. The issue is that the determination of its status as "defective" has not been made, and since it is a legal status, customer perception is not authoritative. If a given software application does not work on your system, even though it meets the minimum requirements on the box, your right to redress is with the software manufacturer. The retailer does not guarantee the function of software and no court has held that it is responsible to do so. The retailer's warranty of merchantability extends only to specify that the product meets the manufacturer specifications. The warranty of fitness extends only as far to deliver a functional disc containing all of the data required of it. Neither software bugs nor DRM problems are retailer/merchant liabilities.
This is a fundamental distinction which Slashdotters seem wholly unable to grasp. They haven't sold you anything, so they aren't under any obligation to take any action on your behalf; they have no contract with you. The dispute is not contractual in nature; this comment of yours is non sequitur. The claim of misrepresentation and failure to disclose limitations are the purview of advertising and marketing and not of contracts. The disc fully conforms to the DVD format (the disc type and laser response); there is no DVD specification requirement that these discs do not meet. They do have DVD video (VOB/MPEG2+AC3/PCM) content, and there is no prohibition against copy protection or even machine-specific DRM in the standard. There is no DVD "red book" and no way to argue that the disc is not fit for purpose as a DVD disc (since DVD standards only specify laser response and data structure). The only relevant claims are misrepresentation of product and failure to disclose limitations not apparent.
According to TFA, all they're talking about is changing the designation of films from PG to higher ratings by the *film censors* and not about banning the film from sale or distribution or anything of the sort. The proposed bill would simply require certain topics to have higher censor ratings.
Any free-thinking adult can still buy them.
It's not trolling in the least. I didn't say it was the customer's problem entirely--I said it is no more the retailer's problem than the customer's, and it's not fair to force the retailer to accept the loss because you, the customer, aren't willing to do any of the legwork. Someone needs to deal with Sony, and that means a CUSTOMER needs to step up to the plate and sue. Retailers don't have any stake in the issue and don't make a convincing plaintiff. The retailers aren't the ones advertising DVD compatibility, not that there even is such a thing (the DVD logo is meaningless). The customers are the ones demanding Sony products, even though they have serious problems. The customers are the ones encountering difficulty with Sony products not working as they expect. Sony is the one making the misleading claim.
I swear to Aisha it's not that hard to understand that Sony is the legally liable party. Remember the rootkits? Same deal. Contaminated dog food? Not Petsmart's legal problem. Faulty TurboTax software? Not OfficeMax's responsibility. Failure of hydraulic jack to hold the advertised 2000 pounds, breaking your car? You won't win any money in a suit against Autozone, unless it's a store brand jack.
If you bought one of these DVDs unwittingly and it doesn't work, return it. But don't buy all the DVDs you can find, rip them all, and return them all just because you're having a little tantrum. All that does is make money for Sony and leave retailers with a gaping hole in the cash registers. It's the pump and dump scheme (at the top of this thread) that is reprehensible. It's exploitation of customer service and retailers at their expense, and it doesn't do anything to Sony's bottom line except make it bigger.
Walmart is the 10,000 pound gorilla. No other retailer has the clout that Walmart does, and even large chains like Target and Best Buy would need a massive media campaign to have any sort of effective leverage.
Of course the retailer is going to accept the return--it's good customer service to do so, and however much people like to bitch, stores are remarkably flexible about accepting returns. My point is that the retailer is doing this in good faith and shouldn't be the one victimized by a pump and dump scheme as advocated by the OP.
If you bought one of these discs and found it didn't play, certainly returning it would be one appropriate choice to make (but not ripping it, since you want your money back for not being able to make use of the disc). However, advocating a scheme to go out and buy these products, rip them "on principle" and then dump the pile back at retailers' feet is targeting the wrong party. Retailers are almost never reimbursed for open stock software of any kind--which is why most of them won't accept it generally (they only get money for damaged discs and mis-pressed ones). That's a reality of retail. They'll never make that money back, and customers demand to have the product available (and high initial sales will drive increased orders for the product, because the returned discs can't be put back on the shelves, and empty shelves need to be filled, creating a massive revenue stream for Sony).
No, I'm saying it's inefficient to pressure retailers to correct something disliked about a product vis-a-vis buying the product anyway, and then returning it to the retailer.
It's not the same as something that is plainly and physically broken, which is easily reimbursed. When you have problems with software, you go to the manufacturer. That's the way the digital marketplace was set up (with good reason; retailers and distributors have jack-shit to do with the performance, compatibility, or operation of software and have no capacity to do any sort of testing to defend that guarantee).
If the product is purchased, the manufacturer is paid. If it is returned, the manufacturer does not reimburse for software products, except for mis-pressed or damaged discs. That's why almost no one takes flat-out returns of opened software (this policy predates the piracy scare)--because the retailers have no hope of recouping the loss, and no option not to carry audio CDs, DVDs, and/or software when they have invested in providing those services. Yes, if all the manufacturers band together, they can get Sony to label these DVDs or they can even choose to label them at the stores--but that process takes several weeks and a lot of talks with legal (because the store can't label the discs until it has been demonstrated that it's not a player problem [even though we know it's not]).
Write to Sony, sue Sony, send the disc back to Sony. But advocating *buying* discs in large numbers and then dumping them back on retailers as the OP did only generates more money for Sony, however well-intentioned the idea is.
Precisely. The problem is that these DVDs *do* work for most people, and that the suggestion that started this thread does not treat the problem--customers shouldn't buy Sony DVDs at all if they want to send a message. Buying them and then returning them doesn't guarantee any sort of financial impact on Sony and doesn't motivate them to change. Low first-time sales is the only vector which provides leverage against these bullshit decisions of Sony.
I'm sorry Slashdot moderators and posters don't understand implied warranties, but what I'm saying is not particularly hard to comprehend. Absent a court or regulatory order, nothing is making Sony pay for these returns. Buying and returning them still expands Sony's revenue, so Sony is still going to do it. Customers, further, are returning the discs claiming they aren't "fit for purpose" even though the only reason they make this claim is that they have a DVD logo on them (a logo which has absolutely no meaning to it aside from identifying the disc format--the DVD logo is carried on software titles, proprietary data discs, and video discs with and without copy protection and even machine-specific DRM). It is a faulty customer assumption that the DVD logo means that it plays in a consumer DVD machine, plain and simple.
Yes, that is a reasonable assumption for a customer to make. No, it is not a warranty of fitness issue, and no, the merchant is not the responsible party. It is a misrepresentation claim, and Sony is indeed liable and responsible and should be taken to task. That's all I'm saying.