Via the Hamster, you too can receive between $5.00 and $20.00 as your share of a class action lawsuit over CD pricing pending in the U.S. District Court in Maine. To make it easy to collect your money, you can fill out the claim form online at this website set up specifically for this purpose. It's easy as could be, all you have to do is answer three questions "yes" or "no," and if the answer is "yes" to all three, you get to submit the claim on line. The big one is whether you purchased any CD's from a retail outlet between January, 1995 and December 22, 2000. You don't need receipts or details of your purchases, but you are declaring under penalty of perjury that you did buy one or more CD's during this time period.

So what's the catch? None, other than this:

The cash paid by the Defendants, after the payment of attorneys' fees, litigation and Settlement administration costs, shall be distributed to consumers who purchased Music Products. The number of claims filed will determine the actual amount of the individual refund but will not exceed $20.00 per claimant. If the number of claims filed would result in refunds of less than $5.00 per claimant, there will be no cash distribution to individual consumers. Rather, the cash portion of the Settlement shall be distributed to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products.

In plain English? The total amount available for distribution is a net amount, the amount the losers to the lawsuit have to pay, after litigation and administrative costs and attorneys' fees are deducted. They will then divide that number by the total number of claims filed. If the resulting number is less than $5.00, no money is distributed to the claimants. It all goes to charity.

Call us optimists, we went ahead and filed. It took two minutes.