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UPDATE 11/08/2005: If you absolutely MUST use a Sony Audio CD, you might want to invest in a program called "AnyDVD" from Slysoft. It's recently been updated to bypass Sony's DRM. UPDATE 11/10/2005: Why is this so nasty? Consider the recent article from Slashdot where there's a Trojan that installs an invisible IRC backdoor into your system thanks to Sony's "cloaking" technology. UPDATE 11/15/2005: Boing Boing publishes a great article showing what Sony has been up to here, and it's even worse than hinted at above. There are even "exploits" of the Sony DRM that are causing problems for users with infected computers. Worse (for Sony) is that their solution also appears to be violating the license agreement for the free LAME MP3 encoder. Those of you who know me personally or are familiar with my articles on intellectual property rights on this site know that I really despise digital rights management ("DRM") technologies. It's not that I object to companies wanting to protect their content from piracy. I respect that concern. But as a consumer of digital media (DVDs, music CDs, computer software, etc.), I find that just about every DRM system has serious flaws.
For example, consider copy-protected music CDs. Usually, these play OK on desktop computers but are designed to prevent the consumer from "ripping" the disc to their computers' hard drives and turning the music into MP3 (or other format) files. This is done by the record labels to prevent people from sharing music on the Internet or copying it for their friends, neither of which are things consumers should be doing with copyrighted music. But my problem with this copy protection isn't that it attempts to prevent casual piracy (if it does, which is questionable). My problem is that, as the owner and regular user of a Creative Labs MP3 player, I would like my music to be available on my player when I leave home and leave CD players behind. I don't (and don't want to) upload copyrighted music to the Internet. I don't (and don't want to) share it through P2P systems. I do want the ability to listen to my music in MP3 format on my player, though, and DRM prevents that.
Fortunately, there are ways around these problems. For instance, I can buy the music from a site like Rhapsody, which will allow me to download and burn it to a CD-R without any DRM restrictions. From there, I can rip it to an MP3 and listen to it. Knowing that such solutions exist, though, some music industry outfits are going to extreme measures to "protect" their valuable music content when the music CDs are inserted into PC CD-ROM drives. Consider Sony's latest protection scheme.
The new Sony CDs install software on the PC to enable the user to play them. This software does more than just play the CDs, however. It hides its presence on the user's PC. It also installs device drivers that "front-end" the real device drivers on the PC, meaning that it effectively "takes control" of your CD-ROM/CD-RW drives from Windows. Worse, according to Windows internals expert Mark Russinovich, the code is poorly written and could easily cause a system to crash. This solution isn't a Sony invention, however. It's produced by "First4Internet", a company that specializes in Audio CD DRM technology.
The problem with First4Internet's technology isn't that it tries to prevent users from copying the CDs they purchase from Sony. All DRM technology tries to do that. The real problem is HOW this particular solution works. It hides its presence on the system (both the place where files are stored and the running processes that do the DRM work), just like a virus, malware, or "rootkit" would do. It patches Windows so that it has control over certain parts of the system, which in my mind is something DRM should never do. Worse, it does this in a way that could make a system become unstable or crash-prone, which is really unforgivable.
When confronted with this, instead of apologizing, providing tools to remove the DRM software from a user's system, and vowing to use some other form of DRM technology, Sony merely promised to provide a tool that makes the DRM software "visible" (i.e., doesn't remove it, doesn't shut it off, just makes it visible). When you consider how much trouble Mark Russinovich found in this DRM solution, and how difficult HE found it to remove, this is way too little of a response from Sony.
My advice is that we all vote with our wallets on this one. When you see a Sony disc that ships with DRM, hold on to your cash. Buy it from some other source, like Rhapsody or iTunes, so that your system doesn't become "infected" with this First4Internet DRM. Better yet, just don't buy it at all. (No, I am NOT suggesting you pirate it! I'm saying simply don't buy it.)
It should be noted, to the delight of Mac users, that this DRM problem is unique to Windows and a CD protected with this (and most other DRM formats) can be played just fine on the Macintosh without fear or contamination. (This, in my opinion, is just another strike against this particular DRM solution. If you're going to protect content, protect the CONTENT - don't attack the computer system playing it.) What's saddest to me in all this is that DRM simply doesn't work in general. If an owner of one of Sony's "protected" discs really wants to rip this music to MP3 format, the DRM solution here will NOT stop that. All they'd need to do is fire it up on Linux or Mac OS X and rip it to MP3. There are probably even solutions that allow a user to do this on Windows. The bottom line is, the "bad guys" who want to copy these CDs for their friends, post them as MP3s on the P2P networks, etc., are still going to do that. DRM at most will slow them down a few minutes, hours, or days. Worse, those who pirate music are going to receive it "DRM-free" in general, meaning that a pirate would have no trouble loading an MP3 player up with their music. I, on the other hand, as a paying consumer, can't rip the disc to MP3s and load it to my player. Net effect: The DRM technology doesn't prevent the piracy or the copying, but does make it harder for honest users to play their music on their MP3 devices. And since the DRM technology is usually acquired from outside the music publisher's organization, it comes at a cost and most likely increases the price that legitimate purchasers pay. What I think the music industry fails to realize is that unless a DRM solution is 100% effective (which is an impossibility), it's 0% effective. Allow me to explain. Assume there are 1,000,000 people who want to pirate a given music CD. Of those 999,999 don't have enough knowledge to break the DRM off that CD. Only one of them does. That person cracks the DRM off the music and posts it on a P2P network. The first day, 10 people download it. The next day, it's 100, then 1,000, and pretty soon all 1,000,000 have it. Even if you catch the person who posted that first DRM-free copy, you're probably too late to prevent the 10 people who downloaded it from sharing it to 10 more, and so on. As long as one person anywhere can crack the DRM solution and has some way to share that content, you're probably never going to keep the 1,000,000 pirates from getting their hands on it eventually. Just to further illustrate matters, let's assume we have a 100% effective DRM. That is, out of the 1,000,000 hypothetical people to copy that CD, not one of them can crack it. Let's further say that this DRM is so good that even if we tried to make a recording from the CD while it played in an audio CD player, the copy would suck so bad that no one would want to listen to it. Thus, for all intents and purposes, you just CAN'T copy this particular CD, period. Do you really believe that all 1,000,000 of those potential music pirates are going to rush out and pay $14.95 (or whatever price they're charging) for it? Not likely. They'll just move on to some other album. Sure, a few may buy it, but a few of them would have bought it after downloading it and deciding they liked it, too. So, in this example, DRM worked but it still failed. That is, we kept people from pirating the music, but we didn't convince the 1,000,000 pirates to buy it either.
Bottom line, DRM hurts more than it helps.
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