Sony Rootkit Settlement Reached, Approved
Somehow this escaped our attention, but on May 23, the judge approved the settlement on the Sony rootkit debacle, you remember, the one where they installed crippling programs on your computer to prevent you from copying their precious cds?
If you bought any of the affected albums on this list, you can get three free albums or one free album plus $7.50. Sony will also distribute a patch to remove the malware from consumer's computers.
Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Cindy Cohn told The Register, "This settlement gets music fans what they thought they were buying in the first place: music that will play on all their electronic devices without installing sneaky software."
Yay. It's over. We can all go back to safely buying crappy Sony music.
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So Sony admits in this settlement that the actual value of any of its CDs is really $3.75? So how do they justify the current retail price, which is the REAL problem with music retailing?
and are they contractually obligated to make sure that the new CDS are NOT infected? or do they simply send you the infected CDs that were returned to them from retailers, since there's a patch now for once you're infected?
Agreed. Sony needs a wake up call. While it is not a real boycott on my part, I do try not to see Sony Pictures movies, buy Sony Music or Sony products of any kind. I fervently hope that Blu-Ray will fail and the proprietary format brings the company down.
It's nice to see that a year later we finally get some return from that. Maybe the patch will actually /remove/ the rootkits. I've given up on Sony already. Only thing I have from them is an old TV and stereo.
Anyone here have a minidisc player and use Sony's ghastly SonicStage software to (try and) move tracks between their MD and PC? In previous iterations it was astoundingly buggy and generally really infuriating in its use and lack of common-sense features.
Naturally, this led to a lot of vitriol among consumers on the internet and elsewhere. Now the most recent version, while still a bit aloof, does include a lot of the features which John Q. Minidisc-Owner was howling for. So Sony do listen to consumer annoyances.
Eventually.
If you bought any of the affected albums (allowing for a few exceptions) on the list, what you should get is a swift kick in the arse.
No thanks, I';ve been thinkning of giving up on Sony since their quality has been in a downward spiral fomr the late 80's-on. This really sealed the deal for me. I'm done with Sony.