Sony CD Settlement Info
 

http://www.eff.org/sony/


The benefit might actually be worth pursuing - a replacement CD and either $7.50 cash and 1 free album download, or 3 free album downloads. I might go for that. There's a list of affected CDs on the site. The only one I've got is DMB's Stand Up, which, sadly, sucked so bad I haven't even had the chance to be affected by the software issue that is the root of the settlement.

Reading some of the fine print, the free downloads are only from a list of 200 albums. I haven't found the list yet, but something tells me it'll be as fruitful as trying to find 6 decent CDs from BMG.

My Backstreet Boys and Clay Aiken CDs are on there!



Just kidding...

I found the list of 200 CDs offered for download buried in a .pdf here:

http://sonybmgcdtechsettlement.com/p...tAgreement.pdf

It's around pages 83-84 of the .pdf doc. Not as bad a list as I would have imagined, but the stuff I like, I've already got and the rest isn't that interesting. Maybe I could find 3 things to take a chance on (Nellie McKay being the only one that stood out after my first glance), so who knows.

Man, looking at that list, and seriously I gotta say "Good luck with that." Looks like every underproducing record they have released within the last 5 years is there.

Well, considering the grief caused trying to remove the rootkit in the first case, this just smells like (without reading the article) one of those "admit no fault, but here's free Sony product to make up for the damage caused by a Sony product" settlements to me.

Funny, the last album I bought "Patty Loveless - On you way home" royally screwed up my computer.
I had to dump my hard drive and reinstall from scratch to be able to use my drive to play cds again.
(I have not bought a cd since because I don't trust them)

Now it is one of the replacement cds you can get.
I wonder if it still has the same protection on it.

If you look deeper that benefit is only for a subset of the affected CDs. For most of them (including DMB - the only one I own) you only get either software to fix the computer issue or one free album download depending on which version you have. Also you have to actually mail the CD back to them which is understandable but kind of sucks. I'm not sure its worth digging Stand Up out of the box of misfit CDs just to get an album download from iTunes that could bought for $1 on allofmp3.com.

It's Sony. The album may be on iTunes, but the download they give you almost certainly will be via Sony Connect, to encourage you to use THEIR proprietary music service afterwards.

I didn't follow the whole thing with Sony but just remembered starting a thread in here about a copy protection thing on a cd I wanted to buy. Here's the thread: EMI Music & copy control

It was not Sony but EMI in that case and I never bought the Jane's Addiction cd afterall, not in it CD state anyway (got it from allofmp3 instead).

Out of curiosity, anybody know if EMI was using the same kind of copy protection crap that Sony was using? The logo that the EFF website shows seems familiar enough with what I remember seeing that it could well be...

FM