Sony: If You're Bankrupt, You Must Delete All Our Music

Legal Issues

from the not-having-a-good-week,-Sony? dept

While, at some level, this seems like just piling on to the PR disaster facing Sony-BMG following the rootkit fiasco, it’s still important to highlight some of the ridiculous things the company has done. After telling everyone that rootkits don’t matter, because no one knows what they are, and doing various other questionable moves — almost all of which amount to “trust us,” some people decided to figure out just what kind of bargain they were getting when they trust Sony-BMG. While it’s already been shown that the end user license agreement that comes with Sony’s copy protected CDs doesn’t disclose the rootkit functionality that weakens the security on your computer and is quite difficult to uninstall without breaking parts of your computer — and also doesn’t disclose that the CD phones home occasionally — there’s a lot of things that the EULA does tell you. The folks at the EFF went through it and pulled out some of the more ridiculous terms. By far, the absolute best term in the EULA is that if you file for bankruptcy, you need to delete the music. Recall, of course, that when you buy a standard, non-copy protected CD, there is no EULA at all. However, Sony would apparently prefer that all of you out there who have gone through any form of bankruptcy didn’t listen to their music.