Belgian watchdog sues record biz

Original article posted here.

Quote:

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Belgian consumer watchdog Test-Achats (Test Aankoop), known for its crusade against Nokia's "unsafe batteries", starts the new year with a fresh assault on the music industry. It is taking the music giants EMI, Sony, BMG Music and Universal Music to court for installing anti-piracy systems on their audio CDs.

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This is an odd twist.. usually it's the music inudstry sueing the pirates and consumers. Score one for the good guys. :D It's one thing to have copyright protection but not being able to play a cd on your box, in your car, or make a personal back up is rediculus. I hope they win their case. Good luck Test-Achats. ;)

That post brightened my day :)

Interesting, I bet that suit will have absolutely no meaning in the USA. :(

Hmmmm,

As I understand European Law, you cannot prevent people making a private back-up copy unless you have a replacement policy.

I would also have thought that preventing music being playable on a PC or in car stereo is as likely to promote piracy as to prevent it? It seems to me that these systems are always "cracked" generally sooner rather than later. In fact, they are creating a market for "bootleg" media that will work on the devices mentioned?

Just my £0.02

The main case is that those "CDs" are called "CDs", and they are not. Philips defined the CD-standard, and those copy-protected CDs do not comply with that standard. Test Aankoop (the consumer organisation) has never lost a law suit before (they file one about every two days), and they are definitely going to win this one as well. Maybe this time Philips will wake up. Philips is granting the record companies permission to put the "Compact Disk - Digital Audio"-label on their CDs, Philips is granting CD-player-manufacturers permission to put the CD-label on their players, and it's about time that someone tries to enforce that.

This law suit will probably have no meaning in the US (what record company cares about those million cd's that are sold in Belgium every year), but it might wake up the sleeping giant (Philips)...

I'd say it's a start :)