Update: California class action suit against Sony
CNet provides more details on the California class action suit against Sony I mentioned Tuesday. Among other eyebrow raisers, it was actually filed November 1, just one day after the original blog post that started it all. The suit “asks the court to stop Sony BMG from selling additional CDs protected by the anti-piracy software and seeks monetary damages for California consumers who purchased them.”
The No-Prize is still up for grabs, as the CNet article does not point to the full text of the complaint.
Update: Not any more: Additional posts at Slashdot and at the Washington Post’s Security Fix blog point to a PDF of the actual complaint.
November 10th, 2005 at 4:33 pm
1. The music industry claims that pirating hurts their profits, but they offer no proof. It would be logical to assume that pirating would hurt sales, but two economists determined that file sharing did NOT affect sales (http://www.unc.edu/~cigar/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf).
Based on this research, it is difficult to legitimize the use of DRM. Therefore, the basic assumption of the music industry must be challenged. Dropping sales, based on capitalism, may be overpriced BAD music.
2. The copy protection/activation schemes are discussed in terms of protecting the poor corporation. What about the consumer? For example, suppose a program/music/video whatever uses DRM/activation and the company goes out of business or unilaterally decides to discontinue “support”. The unfortunate customer is left with expensive and potentially unusable software/hardware.
3. Sony used a stealth technology. What happens if several companies use other DRM technologies and these technologies conflict causing a computer crash? It will be virtually impossible to figure out the cause of the crash. Attempting to trace the problem will be time consuming, expensive, may require reloading everything, and may result in lost data. If one is operating a business they could loss a lot of money because of a failed DRM implementation. I would also advocate that since Sony and the other companies are doing this to protect their profits and they cause a system crash that they should be liable for the cost of repair. I realize that this would fly like a lead balloon.
4. The use of stealth technology implies a credibility gap; clearly the companies are attempting to hide what they are doing. If one is paranoid, it is not much of a logical leap to get to dirty tricks. What is to stop one DRM program from disabling another DRM application?????