Wired joins the bandwagon
Wired News: Boycott Sony. Dan Goodin hops on the boycott bandwagon:
…a lot more needs to be said to ensure Sony gets the message: This kind of behavior can never be tolerated. It may be unrealistic to think many will heed this call, but someone’s got to say it: Boycott Sony. Boycott them until they come clean and recall all the infected CDs. Boycott them until they distribute a removal program. Boycott them until they promise never do anything like this again.
Not unrealistic at all, Dan, judging from the activity in the comments of this site and the number of signatures on the petition. And the article hits many of the right points, including the EULA and Microsoft’s recent decision to start uncloaking the software via its antispyware too. But one important point XCP isn’t Sony’s only DRM scheme. The MediaMax scheme from SunnComm is guilty of all of the same violations of customer computers except for the cloaking, and it’s still on the market. In fact, it’s also on one of the CDs that Dan highlighted in his column’s sidebar, My Morning Jacket’s Z. I think Dan does his readers a disservice by inveighing against XCP while recommending a CD with a similarly virulent DRM technology and not mentioning the DRM.
Quibbles aside, I think that more voices like Dan’s need to speak up. As someone pointed out in the comments this weekend, for every one of us who knows about Sony’s actions and is outraged, there are probably 10 or 20 who don’t have any idea–and who have already inadvertently loaded the DRM on their computer. The more mainstream outrage about this, the better.
November 14th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
I’m not buying or putting any more Sony BMG music cd’s in any of my pc’s…Instead I think I’ll just borrow from the local library or friends & record them into a pc as a wave file from my HiFi & then edit & burn tracks as I wish…Mmm, I must write & thank Mr Sony for giving me the motivation!….Tee hee hee hee.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:01 pm
In the interests of getting ‘regular’ folk to recognise just how evil this I’ve knocked up some T shirt designs which you can find here:
http://www.cafepress.com/mojocrash
I’m not actually bothered about selling any shirts - but we should be doing things that non-geeks can understand and I figure a T shirt is a good talking point.
I’m not even suggesting you have to buy them there - make your own. If anyone wants a copy of the artwork to do just that mail me: andy AT hexten DOT net. And if anyone can think of a more compelling desing go for it
November 14th, 2005 at 1:23 pm
Personally I would think a good T shirt design would be ‘SONY XCP…Xtremely Crap Product’…Ho ho ho.
November 14th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
Nice one, Andy. I’m all for t-shirts as long as someone else sells them.
November 17th, 2005 at 11:29 am
Make sure you’re boycotting the all of their products. Look at their website www.sonybmg.com and poke the labels button. RCA, Arista, Columbia, Epic are ALL Sony/BMG labels. The CD that caused my problems with MediaMax (my computer will no longer play any music CDs properly) is an RCA label.
BTW, After I complained over email, the artist’s management company sent me a free new copy without Sony’s viruses on it.