Texas and EFF sue Sony

[Dr Mordrid]

And so it begins....

The crisis at Sony BMG Entertainment worsened Monday when the Texas attorney general sued the record label, saying it violated the state's new anti-spyware law.

Also Monday, a consumer rights group filed a lawsuit against the No. 2 record label that also cites spyware concerns.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) advocacy group's lawsuit is on behalf of three consumers. The lawsuit, which seeks class-action status, asks that Sony BMG repair any damage to consumers' PCs and reimburse them for any other costs. The lawsuit follows similar filings by private lawyers in New York and California.

EFF upped the ante by suing Sony both for the recalled XCP CDs and for CDs that use copy-protection from another firm, SunnComm. Those CDs are still on the market, and were found by Princeton researchers to also be potentially damaging. Like the XCP discs, software is installed on PCs to listen to the CD. But the uninstall program opens computers for attacks, the researchers say. SunnComm says it has posted a new uninstall program.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/co...ony-suit_x.htm

Dr. Mordrid

[schmosef]

It's amazing how these things snowball.

It's wonderful to see the pendulum swing in the direction of fair use and consumer rights for a change.

I wonder if those blokes at First 4 Internet still have their jobs...

[DGhost]

The EFF RULES! definately an organization that has always been worth supporting, but most especially in this day and age.

[Umfriend]

It's wonderful to see the pendulum swing in the direction of fair use and consumer rights for a change.

It's just a temporary setback I'm afraid. Even if you get a conviction out of it you're still far off of changing the law or even stopping RIAA and fellow-criminals succesfully lobbying for it to change their way.

[TransformX]

Speaking of DRM and slightly out of topic:
As far as I've understood, one isn't allowed to back engineer software.
Now if M$ puts a trojan in our computers with one of their popular softwares, or uses GPL code or any other violation, nobody can legally check for this. Am I right or wrong?

[Nowhere]

Depends on the law in specific country.

[rylan]

I really hope all these groups they go after Sony for the maximum damages possible.
With regards to the copyright infringement that Sony did for their spyware program, I heard that one of the class action suits is seeking $2000 per infringement (which is what Sony and the RIAA went for when they sued consumers)... So with about 5 million CDs, thats $10 Billion in fines... plus the Texas spyware fines of $100,000 per computer with 10K CDs sold, so thats another 10 billion.

[Dr Mordrid]

And that's just the overt damages. In most US states the jury can also impart punative damages far in excess of the overt damages.

Shame on Sony if the jurors are computer users

Dr. Mordrid

[Wombat]

Speaking of DRM and slightly out of topic:
As far as I've understood, one isn't allowed to back engineer software.
Now if M$ puts a trojan in our computers with one of their popular softwares, or uses GPL code or any other violation, nobody can legally check for this. Am I right or wrong?

It's legal to reverse engineer software. There may be a contract or EULA that forbids users from doing so, but you don't have to be a user. Plus, Sony's software is installing itself automatically, making that argument moot.