EMI and Sony Lose Lawsuit Over Crippled Music Disks 407
neves writes "A brazilian consumer has sued EMI and Sony, and won! The reason was a copy protection technology in the best seller album "Tribalistas" that didn't play in his car. You can read about it in Folha de São Paulo (babelfish translation here), brazilian biggest newspaper. They must be very afraid, since EMI vice-president defended the company himself in a lawsuit involving less than US$ 350,00. A more detailed report is in my music site Agenda do Samba & Choro (babelfish here), where we release some of the lawsuit files to make it easier for others to sue them. Since last year, we are calling for a boycott (babelfish) of copy protected albums. The companies appealed, and said that they will take the case to the Supreme Court, because it is a 'question of principles'. The consumer is sueing them again, because all new EMI albums in Brazil are being released with copy protection and won't work in his car."
I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:-1, Insightful)
Funny (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Limitations of USian capitalist model (Score:3, Insightful)
In Brazil OTOH they're more used to being told what to do by more socialist governments, and the idea of a standard is more easily applicable to the way they work within regulations anyway.
copy protection doesn't work (Score:5, Insightful)
The real solution to stop piracy is to drop the prices on software, music, and movies to a reasonable amount. A friend of mine was offered a free copy of Windows XP and turned it down because he got such a large student discount (I think $20) that it didn't matter to him. Before anyone points out loss of profit from discounted prices, if more people acutally BUY these things at a discount instead of grabbing them off Kazza, these companies would make the same money that they do today.
Re:I wonder how effective this will be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wouldn't your posting this information on slashdot:
"buy your CD's from Brazil in order to get media that isn't crippled"
Just a thought.
FREENET=FREESPEECH
Oh RIGHT. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is difficult for me to read this sentence and not be a little angry at its blatant hypocrisy. "Principles" indeed:
The vice-president of EMI, Bannitz Luiz, affirms that she is inevitable will happen problems in situations of implantation of new technologies. "the consumer complains, we changes the product. But it is lamentable that certain people use this as extortion form "
Right, because not being able to listen to a CD in my car is an "inevitable problem." And suing them because I can't do this is "extortion." Exactly what principles do these companies subscribe to? (Don't answer.)
The only principle involved here is an affirmation of one's rights as a consumer.
I didn't buy it (Score:2, Insightful)
If I can't copy the songs to my MP3 player, I won't buy the damn thing. I imagine they've lost a lot of sales.
By the way, all of Tribalista's songs are available in Kazaa, proving copy protection doesn't work. Talk about the medicine being worst than the disease.
Setting a precedence (Score:5, Insightful)
Barking Cats (Score:5, Insightful)
A copy-protected 'CD' is a contradiction in terms.
Re:Setting a precedence (Score:5, Insightful)
That thought right there is what seems to scare the big guys the most. See, what they want is for you to own nothing after putting down your hard-earned cash.
They don't want you to own the cd iteself, because then you could give it to someone else since it is your physical property. They most definitely don't want you to own a perpetual license to listen to the CD, because then they couldn't charge you for each time you hear the song.
Seriously, can the editors do their jobs please? (Score:3, Insightful)
Music Disks?
Ahem. Compact Discs, Hard Disk Drives. It's not that hard to get right.
I'm sure someone will mod this down as flamebait but, seriously, would it kill the editors to do their jobs and actually edit the articles that get posted?
Re:Under US Law (Score:5, Insightful)
Ummm, yeah, only the 150 and growing signatories to the WTO will be subject to TRIPS, plus what 20 pending applicants. Hell the TRIPS treaty even mentions countries may be as liberal as the USA by 'allowing' american style "fair-use" exceptions to 'intelectual property' (The single quotes are mine, the double quotes theirs.)
Unless you plan to live in Cuba you ignore your rulers in the American congress at your own peril.
Re:Limitations of USian capitalist model (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't defame the laissez-faire approach.
I don't endorse it, but to be fair most laissez-faire economists still believe that market participants have to label goods and services accurately.
Even a laissez-faire capitalist recognizes that selling a "CD" that will not play in a standard CD player for what it is - fraud.
Republicans on the other hand can probably come up with some idea why this is a good thing.
Re:annoy the shop, leave them at the counter (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Did you ever notice... (Score:4, Insightful)
I should be able to travel whatever products I choose from anywhere I want, excepting only really offensive stuff like narcotics and weaponry.
Baptists:
Nudists:
Muslims:
Jews:
Loggers:
Earth First:
oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
If you seriously believe that the Democrats wouldn't do the same, you need to wake up and smell the fucking coffee.
Stop the partisanship and recognize that both parties have serious issues.
Re:Barking Cats (Score:3, Insightful)
We know this, being up on such issues, but the average music buyer does not. Jane Q. Public expects that what she buys IS a CD and will work in any player/drive she owns. Instead she ends up with a shiny, high-tech coaster.
Another related problem is that real CD's usually aren't labeled as such on the outside of the jewel box. You can't be sure it's the real deal until you've taken it home and opened the package. I've checked my own collection and none have a CD logo on the outside. It's invariably on the inside and/or on the disc itself.
Re:Limitations of USian capitalist model (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, Sony is from Japan, Vivendi Universal from France, BMG from Germany. What's that about the US? This anti-American BS is completely pointless, not insightful. The US has no monopoly on greedy capitalism.
corporations (Score:4, Insightful)
The deal is, it's too easy and hardly ever have corporations been dissolved, which is also the right of the government (meaning we the people) to do. IF we did that easier and according to law,when these artificial person corporations cease being of the public benefit because of excessive profiteering, we wouldn't be seeing all these abuses and gougings. We regulate commerce in this nation, so YES, we could easily decide if a company was violating the terms of the corporate charter by "making too much profit", ie, "gouging" the people and by so gouging would be in violation of being of benefit to society, and that definetly falls under morals and ethics. that's reason we have so many problems now, attitudes such as you espouse, where "profit" is the ONLY factor in an incorporation. It is ONE factor, but that's the one seized on, but it's not supposed to be the only factor.
For an obvious example, Microsoft needs their corporate charter dissolved, IMO, blatant long running gouging and selling broken software and committing felonius acts. These large music and movie companies, again, chronic serial price gouging and actually engaging in fraud and deceit and bribery (payola). They should have been dissolved a long time ago and the boards of directors chucked in the pokye and disallowed from being in any other corporations, ever. And corporations donating money to political campaio\gns? That's pure bribery, anyone can see that, illegal as all get out. Buying votes, it should be illegal as hell and the ones who engage in it strung up as traitors, both the recipients and the givers. I'm completely serious,struing up, hung, treason charges, this "bribery as legal" is insane, it's nuts, it makes a mockery of the vote, and now we have a professiobnal class of politicians who's sole job is to garnner as much bribe money as possible, then to use slick PR advertising and controlling the government as a shared junta to make sure they stay in their positions to be bribed. We need to lose that stuff, like yesterday, and rein in these out of control INTERNATIONAL -not "US" but international- corporations who gouge the US citizen. Do that to a few hundred or so of the most abusive corporations and corporate/government crooks posing as "leaders", and the honest ones could make the money then, still be profitable, and consumers wouldn't be taken all the time, and the nation as a whole would be better off.
The other way, the way it's run now, is some weird form of international corporate anarchy based on bribes and blackmail mostly, it doesn't exist inside our constitutional framework, much as some people think it says that. The US is not organized anarchy, it's a union of organized individuals and states, based around that union, organized for some modicum of common good and benefit, defense, and trade. But the trade is supposed to not only be profitable for the companies and indidividuals inside those companies, but ALSO good for the nation,it's SUPPOSED to be an equal deal there, ie, they are SUPPOSED to look out for the nation, not just their international "bottom line". That's not to say they can't make m
Re:Funny (Score:3, Insightful)
The court ruled that the customers had been decieved as to the nature of the disk, the corp tricking them into believing it was a regular CD. EMI now has a month to appose a label on all modified CDs saying "Warning, this disk cannot be read on any home or car player".
I still think they should have hit them at the wallet where it hurts but it's not part of the culture here (not yet).
Re:Why this is a dangerous precedent (Score:5, Insightful)
perfectly, you know
I disagree.
Consumers buying a disk that looks like a CD, smells like a CD and might reasonably be expected to perform like a CD, have the right to also expect that that disk will play in any machine that carries the official Compact Disc logo -- that's what standards are all about.
The fact that the music industry has deviated from the standard, yet hardly go out of their way to explain that customers are no longer buying a Compact Disc, is deceptive business practice -- something most countries' consumer laws consider to be an illegal act.
If it's good enough for a pack of cigarettes to carry a large, obvious warning, why can't music disks be tagged in the same way by law. The current fine print that says "Enhanced Audio Disk" or whatever just doesn't cut it.
Re:oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
With a Democratic president. Clinton could have vetoed the bill. If he had vetoed it, it would have been DOA - neither party had the strength needed to pass the bill over his veto. So, yeah - the Democratic president had a lot to do with the DMCA getting passed.
<shrug> It probably wouldn't have made a real difference, anyways. The problem with the current state of politics in the US is that the vast majority of the population thinks that everything is divided on party lines, and that "Democrat" and "Republican" continue to mean something; when in fact, the majority of professional politicians in the US pay attention to monied interests (big business, big media, big unions) and no one else. When you have a Congress that's split 50/50 "Democratic"/Republican" but 80/20 "monied interests"/"we the people", something like the DMCA is going to manage get passed.
Re:oh please (Score:5, Insightful)
If you get past posturing being above politics, you'll quickly realize that both parties do indeed have very serious flaws and limitations.
But they are very different flaws.
If you think Democrats are prone to immunize large corporations from truthful labeling in the marketplace then you haven't been paying attention.
There used to be a wing of the Republican party that really believed in the strength of the market system. They've been gone since Reagan. So it's true that neither party has sufficient faith in a true free market, but the ways that they interfere with the market are very different.
Re:An alternative to boycott... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Move along people. There's nothing to see here. (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm not buying it. That's just the PR argument.
It's especially true of the type of organized piracy in Brazil that copy protection will do nothing to hinder it. This has been going on for years in many countries, and I simply refuse to believe that the labels really think they can hinder anything other than casual copying.
Remember, the labels are the same people who don't want to respect the first sale doctrine or fair use rights.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Limitations of USian capitalist model (Score:3, Insightful)
your revisionism is repulsive (Score:2, Insightful)
Here is a simple page explaining some of this fraud
http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/28/usa.html
Here is a partial paste from that page:
The United States of America was born of a revolt not just against British monarchs and the British parliament but against British corporations.
We tend to think of corporations as fairly recent phenomena, the legacy of the Rockefellers and Carnegies. In fact, the corporate presence in prerevolutionary America was almost as conspicuous as it is today. There were far fewer corporations then, but they were enormously powerful: the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, the British East India Company. Colonials feared these chartered entities. They recognized the way British kings and their cronies used them as robotic arms to control the affairs of the colonies, to pinch staples from remote breadbaskets and bring them home to the motherland.
The colonials resisted. When the British East India Company imposed duties on its incoming tea (telling the locals they could buy the tea or lump it, because the company had a virtual monopoly on tea distribution in the colonies), radical patriots demonstrated. Colonial merchants agreed not to sell East India Company tea. Many East India Company ships were turned back at port. And, on one fateful day in Boston, 342 chests of tea ended up in the salt chuck.
The Boston Tea Party was one of young America's finest hours. It sparked enormous revolutionary excitement. The people were beginning to understand their own strength, and to see their own self-determination not just as possible but inevitable.
The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, freed Americans not only from Britain but also from the tyranny of British corporations, and for a hundred years after the document's signing, Americans remained deeply suspicious of corporate power. They were careful about the way they granted corporate charters, and about the powers granted therein.
Early American charters were created literally by the people, for the people as a legal convenience. Corporations were "artificial, invisible, intangible," mere financial tools. They were chartered by individual states, not the federal government, which meant they could be kept under close local scrutiny. They were automatically dissolved if they engaged in activities that violated their charter. Limits were placed on how big and powerful companies could become. Even railroad magnate J. P. Morgan, the consummate capitalist, understood that corporations must never become so big that they "inhibit freedom to the point where efficiency [is] endangered."
The two hundred or so corporations operating in the US by the year 1800 were each kept on fairly short leashes. They weren't allowed to participate in the political process. They couldn't buy stock in other corporations. And if one of them acted improperly, the consequences were severe. In 1832, President Andrew Jackson vetoed a motion to extend the charter of the corrupt and tyrannical Second Bank of the United States, and was widely applauded for doing so. That same year the state of Pennsylvania revoked the charters of ten banks for operating contrary to the public interest. Even the enormous industry trusts, formed to protect member corporations from external competitors and provide barriers to entry, eventually proved no match for the state. By the mid-1800s, antitrust legislation was widely in place.
In the early history of America, the corporation played an important but s
Re:annoy the shop, leave them at the counter (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm glad some people on here got the point. If you want to make a statement, unless you want it falling on deaf ears, find a manager. I bet the cashier would be more than happy to get one for you.
And if you want to know the honest truth, 9 times out of 10 they will probably side with you; but thae the downside to being powerless, disposable labor is they can't do a thing for you. The only thing that giving them a hard time will do, is make them stop listening.