More Sony Madness
Sony is getting worse PR than George Bush these days. Check out thier EULA (end user lisence agreement).
My personal favorite is: "If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home."
My personal favorite is: "If your house gets burgled, you have to delete all your music from your laptop when you get home."
posted by James Harris at 10:45 AM
11 Comments:
Who knew that your soul is now included in the purchase of a Sony CD? I think the first paragraph makes a great point in that you are not purchasing a license to use the product. You are buying the product, and you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don't violate the rights of the copyright owner. I'm guessing that the rights of Sony do not include all of this bullshit.
It's not their right, but when purchase any item you are entering into a legaly binding contract. So, when you purchase a disc from Sony, whether you know it or not, you are agreeing to these terms in a legal contract. While it's not really their "right" it is completely legal. Fuck Sony.
I'd now like to take this opportunity to quote the great Fat Mike:
Kick back watch it crumble
See the drowning, watch the fall
I feel just terrible about it
That's sarcasm, let it burn
I'm gonna make a toast when it falls apart
I'm gonna raise my glass above my heart
Then someone shouts "That's what they get!"
For all the years of hit and run
For all the piss broke bands on VH1
Where did all, their money go?
Don't we all know
Parasitic music industry
As it destroys itself
We'll show them how it's supposed to be
Music written from devotion
Not ambition, not for fame
Zero people are exploited
There are no tricks, up our sleeve
Gonna fight against the mass appeal
We're gonna kill the 7 record deal
Make records that have more than one good song
The dinosaurs will slowly die
And I do believe no one will cry
I'm just fucking glad I'm gonna be
There to watch the fall
Prehistoric music industry
Three feet in la brea tar
Extinction never felt so good
If you think anyone would feel badly
You are sadly, mistaken
The time has come for evolution
Fuck collusion, kill the five
Whatever happened to the handshake?
Whatever happened to deals no-one would break?
What happened to integrity?
It's still there it always was
For playing music just because
A million reasons why
All dinosaurs will die
Very nice Fat Mike. Is that a recent song, or an older one? Either way, I'm willing to be that it will ALWAYS somehow be current. I see no hope...
Back to Sony...
The finally agreed to pull the rootkit (-infected) CD's from stores. See
http://techdirt.com/articles/20051114/237209_F.shtml
The problem is this: you know damn well Sony will do almost anything to continue with their purpose that initiated the rootkit. So, in a month or so, when all this blows over, they will undoubtedly stick something else on all their CD's that will accomplish the same thing or perhaps something even more sinister...
Oh, and their offering some sort of exchange for the CD's that have already been purchased, to follow later this week.
By the way, I just read another article (what a fuckin dork I am) that mentions that the CD's are "technically not CD's because they don't conform to the CD standard"
Conform Sony!!! Fucking Conform!!!
The song is called dinosaur's will die and it's off of pump up the valium, which I believe came out like 5 or 6 years ago.
Obviously what Sony has done is unethical and simply a poor business plan. But why is no one talking about Microsoft, who consistently exposes it's users to security holes that are easily exploited?!? Shouldn't consumers and businesses be outraged that they are open to this type of security risk. Sony is a "reputable" corporation, and that's why this story is getting so much face time, but root kits are installed millions of times a day but unrepeatable predators you just don't hear about it in the news. Sony needs to clean up it's act and Microsoft needs to tighten up their products.
The band is called Wolf Parade, but the show sold out the same day tickets went on sale, so, oh well. But do check out Wolf Parade's debut album Apologies to the Queen Mary; it's one of, if not the best album of the year.
The RIAA and the MPAA have extensive contracts with a company called BigChampagne. BigChampagne uses software that tracks P2P networks and can compile and insane amount of data about specific users, their files and their downloading habits. For the first several years, before court rulings against P2P networks, the RIAA was using this company secretly. Although I don't know if this qualifies as spying, it does show that the industry as a whole has been thinking about how their consumers use or "misuse" their products and they have gone to secretive lengths to accumulate such data.
here's an example of the data BigChampagne can supply:
To take an example, here's what I can tell you about the Arcade Fire, thanks to a BigChampagne report. The week of August 4, 1.3% of filesharers-- maybe 200,000-300,000 people-- were sharing the band's music, up from just .20% last December. From their debut LP Funeral, "Rebellion (Lies)" scored the most listeners-- and the most searches-- and "In the Backseat" got the least. San Francisco is their biggest market this week, with 2.17% audience penetration (far more than, say, a mere .30% in Colorado Springs). And 60.52% of Arcade Fire fans also have Coldplay in their collections, while only 4.22% of Coldplay listeners have Arcade Fire-- but you can also see that 34.63% of the Arcade Fire fans have tracks by fellow indie Canadians Hot Hot Heat, and 9.65% of Hot Hot Heat's fans like to get their Funeral on.
or check out this chart...
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/06/17/business/20050618_GLICK_GRAPHIC.html
Why can't we use HTML in comments? anyone?
I believe the original purpose (at least I'd like to believe) behind BigChampagne was to provide information to the record companies so they would know that Coldplay fans also like, say, Arcade Fire. So, knowing that, they can market Arcade towards Coldplay fans. Before the internet and BigChampagne, record companies could (for the most part) only guess as to what other bands Coldplay fans might like. Or, as another example, Coldplay is huge in Chicago, while hardly anyone listens to them who lives in New York. Using this data, that otherwise would go unnoticed, they can plan accordingly. Like, not to book a Coldplay concert in the Meadowlands, because it will never sellout.
However, since the information is now in the "wrong" hands, it is used for anti-piracy purposes, instead of market research purposes.
Yeah, I'm not saying what BigChampagne is doing is unethical or wrong, in fact I think they're one of the few companies stearing the RIAA in the right direction. My point was to illustrate to Brad that as a whole the RIAA has taken steps to peak into the habits of computer users.
Oh, right. I agree... I was just pointing out that I think BigChampagne originally intended to sell the info to record companies for market research, rather than a tracking tool for the anti-piracy choada boys.
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