Sony music has made news in the past few weeks by bunding a rootkit and other malware with some of their CD releases; it’s harmful to your computer to even put these CDs in the drive. Unfortunately a CD by The Chieftains, Live from Dublin is amongst the CDs which contain the harmful software, and, doubly unfortunately, Sony’s tools to fix the problem thus far only make it worse.
I have no reason to believe The Chieftains approve of this.
Is there any way of finding out what which other CD’s may be infected?
Yes, here’s the list of Sony CDs with MediaMax. However, this is not Sony’s only malware application. The CDs on this list contain the so-called “Sony rootkit” (XCP) malware.
And other labels may use these products, which were both developed by third-parties and licensed to Sony.
That’s good to know, although I’ve never had an experience with their malware…I have the Legion of Boom album by The Crystal Method and never had a problem with it in my computer…in fact I was able to use Nero and a patch to slice through Sony’s so-called content protection.
Which makes me wonder, why do the try and bother with content protection and anti-copying anywhoo…there has yet to be one that can’t be gotten around. The money they’re putting into the R&D of these things surely must be greater than their supposed losses to “piracy.”
Malware irritates the heck out of me. I dislike the idea of things that I legally purchase having it. I haven’t purchased music for this reason. I hope in the future artists will write in their contracts what a publisher can and cannot do with their art.
I’ve seen speculation they’re trying to make the CDs difficult to use with iTunes/iPod to put pressure on Apple to open up their service to other publishers more. That’s speculation, but what’s clear is that none of this is done for the benefit of people who buy the music legally.
Is this stuff the same as on CDs marked ‘copy controlled?’
This sort of stuff infuriates me. Collectors buy the same music repackaged several times if the live long enough. It’s outrageous that you can’t copy music you buy for your own purposes; whoever heard of people being sued for making party or car tapes in the vinyl days or photocopying a whole book so they wouldn’t have to underline the original?
If you are really annoyed, I don’t mind saying that there is a very obvious (but time consuming) technical way around this problem if you want to play that CD safely on your computer but I hesitate to spell it out on a public forum in case it’s illegal for me to do so. How it could be illegal to spell out a way of avoiding computer crashes is beyond me, but obviously I’d also be telling you how you could make illegal copies of that CD in the same breath.
There WERE lawsuits against the manufacturers when recordable
cassette tapes first came out. Then a set amount was added by
Congress to the sale of every blank tape, which goes to the RIAA to
offset “losses”. Same with VCR tapes.
This is entirely legal. Despite Sony’s efforts to make this difficult, you’re within your rights to do this so long as you don’t distribute the copies.
You can disable autorun on your computer to work around the malware installer. That’s simple to do, and since others have already been sued for pointing it out and the suits have gone nowhere, I feel safe saying it. But you want to be damn sure it’s turned off before putting a malware-laden CD into your computer.
Unbelievable. Bloody DMCA.
I had in mind something safer than that.
Like booting with a bootable Linux CD and copying the audio tracks? That would work, too.
This is true, but the tax is to offset losses due to illegal copying, and Wombat’s examples aren’t illegal. Also, I’m not sure it goes to the RIAA, but that’s a side issue.
An odd result of this is that there are now “audio” and “data” recordable CDs. The only differences between the two are 1) a couple of bits set to distinguish the two, and 2) the tax. Since the taxed “audio” CD-Rs are more expensive, nobody uses them except for the few people who own standalone, non-computer, non-“professional” CD recorders which force you to use “audio” media.
So long as you can safely play these CDs on a stereo system, the trick I had in mind couldn’t go wrong. I’m reluctant to spell it out though. I don’t want to be sued, even if the company has no realistic chance of success.
I was merely noting the presense of the lawsuits.
RIAA, BMG, same evil empire.
Amazing how they bandy around “losses due to illegal copying.”
HTF do they know how much revenue they’ve failed to accrue (note, failed to accrue, not ‘lost’) through sales that haven’t happened? Based on what, guesses about how many sales a CD might make worldwide before it’s released? Plenty of albums, books, and movies have bombed beyond all the hype and powerpoint sales predictions some dweeb in Marketing spouts when the decision to run x-ty thousand/million copies is made.
They’ve “lost” nothing. They just haven’t made as much obscene profit as they’d hoped.
DRM… you don’t own the music you’ve bought, you’ve bought nothing but a license to listen to it for a prescribed period (the lifetime of the disc, which in spite of all the promises made in seventies and eighties, starts degrading as soon as it’s produced). Same as a movie on a DVD.
If wouldn’t surprise me if RIAA and others start to go after used CD stores next, citing loss due to people buying used instead of new. There’s one large, very successful chain of used CD stores around here where I do my shopping. They carry new items as well, but I buy used whenever possible/plausible.
Incidentally, when ripping music to one’s computer first started to catch hold in the mid to late ninties there was a succsessful lawsuit against one of the record labels (I don’t recall which, too long ago) for producing a disk that was unplayable in a computer CD drive. The lawsuit was based on a law previously mentioned (and previously unmodified at this time) that allowed for the unlimited use of the CD by the private buyer under the exception that profit was not made from duplication and that duplicates were not distributed. To the best of my memory, the case was settled out of court and very quickly dropped off the public radar, which IMHO is exactly what the record label wanted. I can remember I was in high school when it happened, but I cant seemed to find anything about it on the net 
. Most of us could have cared less because none of us could afford what they were asking for CD players to begin with, let alone a fancy newfandangled CDthingymaboppamagoo for our computers… 
Record labels tried to kill off the used CD market with sanctions years ago. I don’t know if they’ll try again, but it didn’t go so well for them last time. Aside from being legal, it’s pretty small potatoes next to Internet piracy.
Well now, here’s an interesting article about the ‘evil empire’. Shocking stuff…
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051004-5382.html
If the article is to be believed, it indicates that, in an attempt to crush their only competitors, the RIAA uses law enforcement agencies to wrongfully arrest individuals that legally distribute content produced by independent musicians!
Interesting article about Sony copy protection.
http://news.com.com/2100-1025_3-5087875.html