stuart test blog

I’ve just been reading an interesting article on the Ars Technica website about how the copy protection that is being used on new CD’s is making it harder for honest people to enjoy their music while doing nothing to prevent piracy.

This is something I’ve agreed with for some time now – pirates will always find a way to hack around the various DRM’s in use, but honest music fans find out that the CD they just bought won’t play on their Ipod or laptop. I recently bought the new Coldplay album, X&Y, only to find out that when I inserted it into my laptop it tried to autorun an application of some kind. Now this has to be the ridiculous (and ineffective) kind of protection – all I did was press cancel on the autorun application, then opened Windows Media Player (famous for its strict copy protection) and was able to rip the tracks in unprotected mp3 format. According to some sites the ripped mp3’s are supposed to have clicks and jumps in the tracks but I haven’t noticed anything yet.

Apparently, (according to the Ars Technica article) the new Foo Fighters album uses Windows Media DRM. Ipod users who have legitimately bought the album are now discovering that they can’t sync the tracks with iTunes because it will only play in Windows Media Player. So their only options to get the tracks on their iPod is to break the law and try to work around the DRM. Coincidentally, the most illegally downloaded song at the moment is the new Foo Fighters song, Best of Me – perhaps its the iPod owners wanting a way to get it onto their iPod.

I think the only way to counter these forms of protection is to boycott any CD’s that use ridiculous copy protection. These CD’s should indicate on the cover that they are using some form of copy protection so always have a look before you purchase your next CD. Also, you’ll notice that discs that do use copy protection won’t carry the official CD logo,
so when you buy an album with copy protection, you’re not actually buying a Compact Disc: