Liberty's Blog: No Sony for Christmas

Sunday, December 25, 2005

No Sony for Christmas

No Sony Christmas presents from me this year. I was tempted as I was shopping for a flat panel, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm still rather pissed at how they tried to infect our computers with malware, and then they had the gall to deny it all. At any rate I ended up picking out the Akai 32 inch LCD. It was cheaper and had a nicer picture than the Sony. When discussing the malware incident at work, a couple of people mentioned that they wouldn't be buying Sony products because of this. I wasn't aware of any organized boycott of their overpriced crap though. How little did I know!

CHRISTMAS shoppers are carolling past Sony products in a snub for its DRM debacle earlier this month.
Normally Sony would be singing a happy song at this time of year as it is a major market leader for electronic goods. However it looks like consumers are saying humbug to Sony this year.
This is because anti-piracy protection that Sony BMG jacked into music CDs not only turned out to be hard to remove spyware, but happened to be a major hacking risk in its own right.
According to the Globe newspaper, calls for a boycott have been growing on the world wide wibble. Already a No Xmas for Sony graphic designed by Toronto Web developer Gisela McKay's has spread to more than 37,000 sites.

A Google search on the terms "Sony boycott" results in 2,210,000 hits" There is at least one blog dedicated to boycotting Sony. Its all bigger than the DRM thing though, How about their support of the Recording Industry Association of America or the RIAA. These Jackbooted lawyers are running around and suiing thousands of people for what they finding on their computers. Typically they file a suit, and demand blackmail under the threat of a long and more expencive suit. and more at One women is fighting back:

Santangelo says she has never downloaded a single song on her computer, but the industry didn't see it that way. The woman from Wappingers Falls, about 80 miles north of New York City, is among the more than 16,000 people who have been sued for allegedly pirating music through file-sharing computer networks.
"I assumed that when I explained to them who I was and that I wasn't a computer downloader, it would just go away," she said in an interview. "I didn't really understand what it all meant. But they just kept insisting on a financial settlement."
The industry is demanding thousands of dollars to settle the case, but Santangelo, unlike the 3,700 defendants who have already settled, says she will stand on principle and fight the lawsuit.
"It's a moral issue," she said. "I can't sign something that says I agree to stop doing something I never did."
If the downloading was done on her computer, Santangelo thinks it may have been the work of a young friend of her children. Santangelo, 43, has been described by a federal judge as "an Internet-illiterate parent, who does not know Kazaa from kazoo, and who can barely retrieve her email." Kazaa is the peer-to-peer software program used to share files.
The drain on her resources to fight the case - she's divorced, has five children aged 7 to 19 and works as a property manager for a real estate company - forced her this month to drop her lawyer and begin representing herself.
"There was just no way I could continue on with a lawyer," she said. "I'm out $24,000 and we haven't even gone to trial."

Sony seems to thing of her customers as the enemy. While I really am a big fan of some of her products, I will not be giving them 1 cent. I won't spec out any Sony Monitors at work any more, nor will I be buying PSP game systems, No BMG Sony CDs, and no Sony Pictures movies for me. I work hard for my money, and I would hate to see any of it got to the heavy handed Sony thugs.