Is it a car company's fault if you put sugar water in the gas tank and it
destroys the engine?
Is it a printer manufacturer's fault if you put toilet paper through your
printer and completely destroy the print heads?
No -- is the consumer's fault in those cases.
In the case of the copy protected CDs, things aren't so clear. It still
isn't the computer manufacturers fault-- at the time of design and
manufacture, they cannot predict changes in technology and they certainly
can't predict and account for changes in technology that are designed to
break their products!
The problem with the copy protected audio CDs is that the CD manufacturer
has purposefully designed a CD to be incompatible with computer hardware.
They have purposefully violated a standard that hardware manufacturers have
been manufacturing to for nearly two decades (since 1983/1984).
Let's rephrase the question slightly:
Should it be legal for antitheft devices to destroy property? In
particular, should it be legal to destroy property in contexts where it is
not 100% guaranteed that a theft was actually in progress?
That is exactly what the audio CD manufacturers (to be fair, the folks
mastering the CDs) are doing. They are purposefully creating a piece of
media that, when inserted into a computer, can cause data loss [a number of
PCs outright crash when faced with these CDs] or even changes to the
hardware that require relatively nasty fixes (as is the case with the Macs
-- it doesn't hurt it, just leaves it such that there is no way to get the
damned disk out).
Sure -- it may be the fault of the consumer for actually sticking the CD into
their computer.
But it would seem that the folks that created the format in direct violation
of published standards should share some of the blame and resulting
liability. [Bill Bumgarner via risks-digest Volume 22, Issue 08]
14:43
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