Sony DRM Installed Even When EULA Declined 433
HikingStick writes "News.com is reporting that the Texas attorney general is expanding the allegations against Sony. It seems the software would install even if users declined the EULA. From the article: 'The Texas attorney general said on Wednesday that he added a new claim to a lawsuit charging Sony BMG Music Entertainment with violating the state's laws on deceptive trade practices by hiding 'spyware' on its compact discs ... The new charges brought by Abbott contend that MediaMax software used by Sony BMG to thwart illegal copying of music on CDs violated state laws because it was downloaded even if users rejected a license agreement.'"
To save some clicking (Score:5, Informative)
Supposedly there is about ten times [com.com] more SunnComm DRM in the wild than XCP DRM, so maybe Sony felt they couldn't sacrifice holiday sales despite the legal exposure.
Re:Can anyone here see a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:EULAs are stupid... (Score:3, Informative)
That's news to me. Most EULAs I've read on shrink wrapped software state that you can return the software for a full refund if you don't agree with the terms and conditions. If the store won't accept the return due to some stupid policy, then contact the software maker directly for your refund.
Re:While I'm pleased I suppose... (Score:5, Informative)
From my law classes, my lawyer professors told me that a favorite trick of lawyers is to allege as many possible crimes/violations as possible so as to make the other side more likely to either plea bargain or settle as well as to raise the chances of successfully arguing at least ONE of the charges/torts.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, just had some law classes)
EULA makes no difference (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:3, Informative)
Um
I've also been able to avoid DRM on my system by not using or installing anything that I know has DRM associated with it, like Media Player and iTunes. CDex, WinAmp, and the Shift key are the Three Amigos for just about every audio CD out there.
So, I don't know what you're going on about. The technology has been available for a while.
List of Effected CD's (Score:3, Informative)
Senior Vice President of Software Development (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.sony.com/SCA/press/051222.shtml [sony.com]
Hmm someone get fired?
Re:Let me get this straight (Score:3, Informative)
To fix this security and UI flaw, I've disabled autorun on our company systems, which breaks certain other features..
OS X does not autorun. It can, based on the content, start iTunes or iPhoto or something, but it will not automatically run programs from the CD. Which is wonderful. (On OS X, Sony has to beg the user to install the DRM manually-- what a difference!)
Re:Can anyone here see a problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Why? Class actions are efficient. In this case, everyone would be alleging the same thing against the same defendant. It's far better to have that go to court once, rather than have everyone litigate the same thing, which wastes their time and money and clogs up the courts.
If you have a tortfeasor that harms a lot of people, but where the harm to any one person is slight, you still want to have them cure the harm they caused and to punish them so that they don't do this again in the future. This is not practical if everyone has to sue independently, since many people will not bother (and thus go uncured) and the tortfeasor will not be significantly deterred from doing it again. A class action is an efficient pooling of resources (even if each person harmed is only awarded $1, they only are paying 33 cents for the lawyer -- that's a good deal, really) and can actually deter future tortfeasors.
Wait, it is costly to sue a big company? Might that be due to the laws created in your state? Might that be due to the lawyers in control of the operation of the law?
No. It's costly because, in the interests of justice, you have to do a competent job proving that the company did something wrong. Most people do not know how to do this. Complaining that the system is complicated is as silly as complaining that people can't build moon rockets in their backyards -- some diciplines are inherently complicated. Actual justice is hard.
but a bunch of state lawyers
State lawyers are just employees. They get a fixed salary like other state employees. It's sole practicioners and partners at firms that get shares of the damages. So if the state wins, the money probably ends up in the state's general fund.
The problem is that contract law is too complicated, and you can't fight a contract violation in court without a contract lawyer who likely is part of an organization that wrote the law.
All lawyers get trained in contracts, and since most lawyers deal with contracts no matter what else their specialties are, we all can generally deal with them. Also, most contract law is common law, and has been created by the courts in the US and England over the last thousand years or so. Most of the people who wrote contract law are long dead, and were never particularly organized.
Let us return to the days when the law was simple to read
That's never been true, unless you want to go back to an eye for an eye. Law is inherently complex. There is no magical set of laws -- laws being rules for a good, stable, working society -- that is simple and will function. You're looking for a utopia, and those don't exist.
Using the Shift to prevent autorun (Score:3, Informative)
What has worked flawlessly for me is this: hold the shift key down while the disc is spinning up. After the light goes out, you need to wait until there is a second blip on the activity LED. It's that second blip that actually indicated that the system is searching the disc for an autorun.inf file. If I release the Shift before that second blip, the autorun kicks in - every time. If I wait for about one or two seconds after that second blip, the autorun is stopped.
How long this takes seems to be determined by how easily your disc is read by the drive. I have one system with two DVD writers, one old, one new. A CD-R on the old one can take upwards of 30 seconds for it to be recognized and searched for the autorun file. The new drive takes about 10 seconds. In either case, waiting until after the second activity light to release the Shift prevent the autorun.
Just my two one-hundreths of a dollar. Convert to your currency as apporpriate.
illegal copying? Excuse me? (Score:5, Informative)
Since when was it illegal to copy a music CD to put it on ones iPod? Doing so with regular music CDs doesn't violate the DMCA since there is no protection circumvention or reverse engineering going on, so this SHOULD still be legal in the US.
Of course, IANAA (I Am Not An American), so I may have it wrong.
Re:Can anyone here see a problem? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Criminal Tresspass (Score:3, Informative)