In the news… (dunno if anyone has posted this already… search engine not friendly with me…)
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/industry/05/21/bc.media.cd.piracy.reut.reut/index.html
So… to all who were complaining about Sony’s latest attempt at piracy protection, here’s a quick fix. Not that I’m condoning that kind of thing, but something HAS to be said about people sucessfully circumventing the new measures by using a simple felt-tip pen…
sigh
Elly
Hilarious!
In a similar vein, the Nintendo 64 had its own method of protecting cartridges. In this case, they wanted to be sure that zone releases of games could only be played within that zone, more or less. Since Nintendo is a Japanese company, most Nintendo releases were in Japan first, and sometimes only. In order to circumvent this you simply broke off a little piece of superfluous plastic where the cartridges were inserted. 
Don’t play import games myself, though. Can’t speak a lick of Japanese, and all the games I play are heavy on text or audio.
As far as the CD protection goes, this is getting to be ridiculous. I’m all for property rights, and there is no “but” to follow, other than noting that the market is going to have to find a way to adjust to this somehow.
I can’t really think of a way myself other than proprietary readers, but even then, once the music is played anyone can route the signal going to the speakers and copy it anyway. This seems like an unfortunate, honorable, but losing battle to fight.
I was talking to a guy over the wkend who didn’t have a stereo and played all of his music through a comp (apple)
The only way he could have played Celine Dion’s new album( not that he would have but still ) was with a ripped copy. Idiotic behaviour on behalf of Sony. Messing comp.s up when they could be used perfectly legally.
Silly and counter productive IMO
And don’t forget, coloring the edges of your CD’s with a green magic marker makes them sound better.**
** Not really, but this was a very popular urban legend back when CDs first came out. Link
I know of at least one person who bought a protected CD, only had a computer to play it on, and had to return it. He then got the tracks from a peer-2-peer file sharing network.
So in at least this case, the copy protection had the exact opposite effect as was intended.
I don’t play music on my comp but I had to laugh hard at the resourcefulness of the end-around. You know that whatever company SONY hired to develop this encryption solution got canned in a heartbeat given this strategy was so vulnerable to a decidedly low-tech maneuver.
I was reading about this in my Bonehead of the Day Award newsletter yesterday. (it’s still on the site, I think… and if not, you can get the archives) Thought it was kinda funny… a decidedly low-tech solution to a high-tech “problem”.