Sony BMG Settles Over CD DRM 225
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."
SparkArt? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Score:5, Interesting)
"Customers have 180 days to file claims, which must include a description of how their computer was harmed and documentation of repair expenses."
Granted, $175 is still a decent amount of money. So if you're computer was reasonably fscked, it would probably be a good idea to go through the paperwork. Unfortunately, Sony is probably betting that most people will probably decide it's not worth the hassle. Then, there's the fact that about half of the paperwork customers file will end up going to some overworked, incompetent paper-pusher office slave who will either take way too long to approve the request, or reject it for some bullsh*t reason,...
Re:The Best Democracy Money Can Buy (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot editors brainwashed or what? (Score:5, Interesting)
drm not favored (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Completely unacceptable! (Score:3, Interesting)
Ok, that is reasonable. But that they can get out of this without any criminal liability is just not ritght. In what way are they different from a common hacker, except that they commited the crime far more often, for commercial gain and in a conspiracy?
sony will likely pay nothing (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Next Step (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I Bet It's A Big Deal Internally (Score:3, Interesting)
Muckety Muck: Last quarter your unit had profits of $1.5mil. But this quarter you have a loss of $.5mil. Care to explain?
Weasely Sony Music Exec: My predecessor was trying to prevent piracy, but chose a flawed product to do it. It could have cost us tens of millions, but I managed to get it down to $2m. Also, if you give us another 10 million dollars, we have this surefire thing that is guaranteed to work!
Muckety Muck: You sound full of confidence, so you must be right. Here's another 2 million dollars, and a bonus for saving the company money.
These kind of decisions are always made by people who intend to have been promoted into another division by the time the lawsuits roll around.
Re:DRM = Digital Restrictions Management (Score:2, Interesting)