Further to my item of Friday about the proposed settlement of the class-action suit against Sony BMG, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic has come to the rescue. Well, at least they’ve filed an objection to the proposed settlement.
Monday was the deadline for the Ontario court to hear objections to the settlement, which amounts to dramatically less than Americans received in the same kind of suit. At issue is how much Sony should give Canadians who bought certain Sony BMG compact discs that surreptitiously installed a digital rights management technology commonly called a “rootkit,” a tool favoured by nastier hackers that opened up huge vulnerabilities to users’ computers.
“By including a flawed and overreaching computer program in millions of music CDs sold to the public,” the Internet’s legal watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation said, “Sony BMG has created serious security, privacy and consumer protection problems that have damaged music lovers everywhere.”
The EFF called the Canadian settlement “woefully inadequate.” And from a non-legal point of view, it certainly looks like Sony Canada’s lawyers fought tooth and nail for a legal victory, exploiting every difference between U.S. and Canadian laws to their advantage. As an example, the Canadian settlement does not include assurances it made in the U.S. settlement that the record company would watch its behaviour in the future.
The settlement, in short, was entirely devoid of any suggestion that Sony regrets what it had done. It gives Canadian victims the least amount possible, and perhaps even less. In the end, it suggests that Sony Canada isn’t at all interested in the kind of PR disaster it’s courting.
Can you imagine if this had been an auto maker that had installed a gimmick in your car that seriously limited its gas mileage? Would you settle for a TV set that doesn’t get all the channels? What makes Sony think it can walk away from this problem without remorse?
I’m quite prepared to believe that it was all a mistake — that Sony executives bought a rights-management technology they didn’t fully understand. But once shown their error, they should show real corporate citizenry by trying to make amends. Sony certainly acknowledged its mistake when, within days, it announced it was removing the offending compact discs from the market, among accusations that it moved too slowly and too unenthusiastically.
Apologizing quickly and making restitution after such an embarrassing revelation would have been the Japanese way. But the Canadian way is to play hardball with your victims in the courts.
(On a technical note: there are two technologies at issue here, SunnComm's MediaMax and First4Internet's Extended Copy Protection, which do such things as report customer listening of the CDs and installing undisclosed and or hidden files on users' computers that can expose users to malicious attacks by third parties, all without buyer’s notice and consent.)
This kind of ruthless and cavalier attitude to its market has become the hallmark of all the recording companies, the Big Four who have become an oligarchy in the industry, the last step before monopoly.
It doesn’t take a marketing genius to see the problems these companies are creating for themselves.
